“The Pleasure of Solitude”
One evening when Ellen Goodrich had just returned from the
office to her room in Chelsea, she heard a light knock on her door.
She knew no one in the city intimately; there was no one she could
expect. She opened the door and found two small boys standing in
the hallway. She supposed they were ten or eleven. Their clothing
was thin and they were shaking with cold. "Florence Valle live
here?" one of them asked. "I don't know anyone by that name,"
Ellen said. "Perhaps if you ask the landlady — she lives on the first
floor." "We're looking for Florence Valle. She's his cousin," the
second boy said, pointing to his friend. "She used to live here."
"I'm very sorry," Ellen said, "but I don't know her." "Maybe she's
moved," he said. "We walked all the way over here..."
Ellen very seldom felt that she could afford pity and sympathy for
other people, but the boys looked frightened and cold, and her
desire to help them was stronger than her reserve. She noticed them
staring beyond her to a dish of candy in the room. When she invited
them to have a piece, they refused with a shy elaborate politeness
that made her want to take them in her arms. She suggested that
they each take a piece of candy home and went into the room for
the dish. They followed her.
"You got a nice place here, Miss."
"Yuh, you got a nice place here."
Their faces were thin and solemn and their voices were hoarse.
"Haven't you any overcoats, you boys?" she asked. "Are you going
around in the cold dressed like that?" "We ain't got any overcoats,
Miss."
"I should think you'd take cold, walking around like that."
"We ain't got any overcoats." They told her their names and ages
when she asked for them, and said that they lived on the lower East
Side. She had walked through the slums herself and she could
imagine the squalor and neglect in which they must live. While she
was talking with them, she realized that it was the first time in more
than a year that she had allowed anyone other than the landlady to
come into her room. Having the boys there pleased her and she
kept asking them questions until she caught the tone of her own
excited voice. She stopped abruptly. "I guess you had better go
now," she said. "I have some things to do." They thanked her for
the candy and backed out of the room. Altogether, the encounter
left her feeling generous and happy.
Ellen was not a generous person. She lived in a Chelsea rooming
house in order to bank as much of her salary as possible toward
purchasing an annuity. It had always been difficult for her to find
friends. During the ten years she had lived in New York she had
suffered a great deal from loneliness, but this suffering was
forgotten now because of the care with which she arranged her
solitude. She could be unmerciful with herself and others. Her
mother had once written asking if she would help her younger
brother with a loan. "I think it will be better," Ellen replied, "if
Harold experiences a little hardship. It is only in knowing hardship
that he can understand the value of money. I don't pretend to be
poor, but the little I have in the bank was put by at a great sacrifice
and I have no intention of lending it to Harold when we all know
that he could have done as well himself if he tried. I think he owes
it to you to do more than I have done, for, after all, you and Father
spent more on his education than you spent on mine." She was
twenty-eight at the time.
After the boys had gone that night, Ellen changed from her dress
into a house coat and cooked her supper. The cold wind rattled the
windows and made her appreciate the warm, light room. She
washed the dishes and sat down to read a rental-library book. This
was the way she spent most of her evenings, and she was proud of
the fact that she was no longer restless and lonely. But her mind
kept returning to the boys. She saw their thin, solemn faces, and
when she thought of them walking in the cold she was filled with
sadness and pity. Her uneventful life led her to attach significance
to the few irregular things that happened to her. There was some
purpose, she felt, some reason for this accidental meeting.
A week later, at the same hour, there was a knock on the door and
she found the boys in the hallway again.
"We were walking by."
"We thought we'd come to see you."
"Well, I'm very glad you stopped." Ellen said, and realized that her
voice could be heard by the other tenants whose doors opened into
the hallway. There was nothing wrong in what she was doing, but
at the same time she didn't want the other tenants to know that she
was asking strange boys into her room, so she waited until she had
closed the door after them before she spoke again. "I'm very glad
you stopped," she repeated. She invited them to sit down. Then she
thought of giving them a drink of Coca-Cola, but this seemed a
little too forward. They told her they were Italian, and she asked
them if they knew how to make a veal parmigiana, something she
had always wanted to learn. They didn't know, but they told her
about other Italian dishes. One of the boys, the older, seemed
interested in some ornaments on Ellen's dresser and she showed
them to him. The younger boy took a cigarette end from his pocket
and lighted it.
"Aren't you too young to smoke?" Ellen asked.
He looked at his friend and they both giggled. Ellen colored. The
looks they exchanged and their laughter frightened her. "Those are
called maracas," she said nervously, pointing to a pair of painted
maracas that hung on the wall. "I bought them when I went for a
Caribbean cruise in 1933. They use them in orchestras in the
Caribbean."
The incident of the cigarette seemed to have made the boys feel
more at ease. Ellen might have asked them to leave, but she
hesitated. The younger boy put out his cigarette in her pin tray and
she watched him without saying anything. She was enjoying herself
in a way she could not quite understand. They told her stories about
their families, about their sisters, stories that were sly and lewd and
that she should have stopped them from telling. At the end of half
an hour she asked them to leave. They had been gone for some time
before she discovered that her purse was inissing.
If they had been in the room then, she might have murdered them.
She took hold of the back of a chair and held it rigidly until her
arms and her shoulders ached. "They don't have to steal!" she cried.
"They don't have to steal! They don't have to!" She threw herself
onto the bed and wept for a long time. When she sat up, she
composed a discourse on honesty and imagined herself delivering it
to them. She thought of calling the police, but when she tried to
describe what had happened as if she were talking to the police, it
sounded unconvincing and even suspicious. She went into the
bathroom and washed her face with a cold cloth. "They don't have
to steal," she said. "They don't have to steal. I would have given
them money if they need money." She walked the floor, talking
angrily to herself.
In the morning, Ellen decided to forget about the boys; it was better
to lose the fifteen or twenty dollars that had been in her purse than
to lose her peace of mind. Usually she could forget things that
troubled her, but this time it was not so easy. In the back of her
mind was the feeling she had somehow made a mistake that
threatened her whole way of living. A few nights later, on a
Wednesday, someone knocked on the door again. She opened it
and found the two boys standing in the corridor.
She should have been prepared. She had rehearsed often enough
the things she wanted to say, but now, when she tried to speak, she
could think of nothing. "Come in here," she said finally. "Come in
here, both of you. I want to speak to you." They followed her into
the room. "You don't have to steal," she said. "You ought to know
that you don't have to steal." Her voice had risen and she was
trembling so that she had to lean against the wall. "If you need
money, if you really need money, there are honest ways of getting
it. You stole my purse. When you were here last time."
"We didn't steal nothing, Miss."
"We ain't thiefs."
"Well, there's no use in standing here arguing about it," she said.
"Get out."
"Give us five dollars, Miss."
"Get out," Ellen said. "Get out of here before I call a policeman!"
They backed out of the room and she closed and locked the door
and listened to them going down the hall. That night she dreamed
about them. She could not remember the details of the dream
clearly, but when she woke up she was depressed and frightened.
Her sleep was troubled for the rest of that week. On Friday she felt
that she was coming down with a cold and got permission to leave
the office at noon. She picked up a book at a rental library and
bought some groceries for dinner.
In spite of her illness, she enjoyed Her solitude more that afternoon
than she had for some time. She read until dusk. Before turning on
the light, she went to the window to draw the shade. A swift snow
was falling slantwise between her window and the back yards. She
bathed and went to bed at seven, slightly feverish. She was half
asleep when she heard them knocking on the door. She
remembered that she had forgotten to put the latch down. They
talked for a while in the hall, knocked again, and then pushed the
door open. When they saw her lying on the bed, they went over and
stared at her.
"You sick, Miss?"
"Please leave me alone," she said weakly. "Please get out."
"We want some money, Miss."
"Can't you see that I'm sick?" she said. It was an effort for her to
talk. "Please get out. I haven't any money."
One of them saw her purse on the table. He went to it, removed the
change purse, and started to take out the bills. She got out of bed
and struck him, but he already had the money in his hand. She tried
to get it away from him, but he was stronger than she; he was able
to free his hand, and both boys ran out of the room and down the
hall. She stood in the doorway shouting, "Mrs. Duval, Mrs. Duval!"
There was no answer, and she threw herself on the bed, too sick
and tired to cry. Ten minutes later the landlady knocked on the
door and asked what the matter was. Ellen told her she thought she
had heard some strange men in the corridor and the lock on the
front door should be fixed.
The next morning, Ellen decided to move. It was not easy for her,
but she was desperate. One of the girls in, her office recommended
a rooming house on East Thirty-seventh Street, and Ellen went
there that night and engaged a place. She took her possessions over
the following night in a taxi. The new room was not as pleasant as
the one she had left, but she tried hard to make it seem familiar.
She felt that in a way she was beginning a new life.
She walked to the rooming house the next night from the office. It
was raining hard, and as she turned off Madison Avenue onto
Thirty-seventh Street she saw them standing in front of the house,
staring up at the windows. The rain was cold and the boys were
without hats and coats. She walked down to Thirty-fourth Street
and ate her dinner in a restaurant there. It was eight o'clock before
she started back, and they had gone. She went to her room, set her
umbrella in a saucer, and changed from her wet dress into her
house coat. Someone knocked on the door and she opened it and
they were standing there. "How did you know I was living here?"
"The lady in the other place told us." "For once and for all, get out.
Leave me alone, leave me alone, can't you?" She took her umbrella
and struck the younger one on the shoulders with all her strength.
He fell to his knees and then to the floor and she continued to beat
him while the other began shrieking, "Help! Police! Police!" so that
his voice could be heard in the street.
The Sutton place story
Deborah Tennyson waited in her nursery on Sunday morning
for a signal from her father that would mean she could enter her
parents' bedroom. The signal came late, for her parents had been up
the night before with a business friend from Minneapolis and they
both had had a good deal to drink, but when Deborah was given the
signal she ran clumsily down the dark hall, screaming with
pleasure. Her father took her in his arms and kissed her good
morning, and then she went to where her mother lay in bed. "Hello,
my sweet, my love," her mother said. "Did Ruby give you your
breakfast?
Did
you
have
a
good
breakfast?"
"The weather is lovely out," Deborah said. "Weather is divine."
"Be kind to poor Mummy," Robert said "Mummy has a terrible
hangover."
"Mummy has a terrible hangover," Deborah repeated, and she
patted
her
mother's
face
lightly.
Deborah was not quite three years old. She was a beautiful girl with
wonderful, heavy hair that had lights of silver and gold. She was a
city child and she knew about cocktails and hangovers. Both her
parents worked and she most often saw them in the early evening,
when she was brought in to say good night. Katherine and Robert
Tennyson would be drinking with friends, and Deborah would be
allowed to pass the smoked salmon, and she had naturally come to
assume that cocktails were the axis of the adult world. She made
Martinis in the sand pile and thought all the illustrations of cups,
goblets, and glasses in her nursery books were filled with OldFashioneds.
While the Tennysons waited for breakfast that morning, they read
the Times. Deborah spread the second news section on the floor
and began an elaborate fantasy that her parents had seen performed
so often they hardly noticed it. She pretended to pick clothing and
jewelry from the advertisements in the paper and to dress herself
with these things. Her taste, Katherine thought, was avaricious and
vulgar, but there was such clarity and innocence in her monologue
that it seemed like a wonderful part of the bright summer morning.
"Put on the shoes," she said, and pretended to put on shoes. "Put on
the
mink
coat,"
she
said.
"It's too hot for a mink coat, dear", Katherine told her. "Why don't
you
wear
a
mink
scarf?"
"Put on the mink scarf," Deborah said. Then the cook came into the
bedroom with the coffee and orange juice, and said that Mrs.
Harley was there. Robert and Katherine kissed Deborah goodbye
and
told
her
to
enjoy
herself
in
the
park.
The Tennysons had no room for a sleep-in nurse, so Mrs. Harley
came to the house every morning and took care of Deborah during
the day. Mrs. Harley was a widow. She had lived a hearty and
comfortable life until her husband's death, but he had left her with
no money and she had been reduced to working as a nursemaid.
She said that she loved children and had always wanted children
herself, but this was not true. Children bored and irritated her. She
was a kind and ignorant woman, and this, more than any bitterness,
showed in her face when she took Deborah downstairs. She was
full of old-country blessings for the elevator man and the doorman.
She said that it was a lovely morning, wasn't it, a morning for the
gods.
Mrs. Harley and Deborah walked to a little park at the edge of the
river. The child's beauty was bright, and the old woman was
dressed in black, and they walked hand in hand, like some amiable
representation of winter and spring. Many people wished them
good morning. "Where did you get that enchanting child?"
someone asked. Mrs. Harley enjoyed these compliments. She was
sometimes proud of Deborah, but she had been taking care of her
for four months, and the little girl and the old woman had
established a relationship that was not as simple at it appeared.
They quarrelled a good deal when they were alone, and they
quarrelled like adults, with a cunning knowledge of each other's
frailties. The child had never complained about Mrs. Harley; it was
as though she already understood the evil importance of
appearances. Deborah was taciturn about the way in which she
spent her days. She would tell no one where she had been or what
she had done. Mrs. Harley had found that she could count on this
trait, and so the child and the old woman had come to share a
number
of
secrets.
On several late-winter afternoons when the weather had been bitter
and dark and Mrs. Harley had been ordered to keep Deborah out
until five, she had taken the child to the movies. Deborah had sat
beside her in the dark theatre and never complained or cried. Now
and then she craned her neck to look at the screen, but most of the
time she just sat quiet, listening to the voices and the music. A
second secret — and one much less sinful, in Mrs. Harley's opinion
— was that on Sunday mornings, sometimes, and sometimes on
weekday afternoons, Mrs. Harley had left the little girl with a
friend of the Tennysons. This was a woman named Renee Hall, and
there was no harm in it, Mrs. Harley thought. She had never told
the Tennysons, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.
When Renee took Deborah on Sundays, Mrs. Harley went to the
eleven-o'clock Mass, and there was nothing wrong, surely, with an
old woman's going into the house of God to pray for her dead.
Mrs. Harley sat down on one of the benches in the park that
morning. The sun was hot and it felt good on her old legs. The air
was so clear that the perspective of the river seemed to have
changed. You could throw a stone onto Welfare Island, it seemed,
and a trick of the light made the downtown bridges look much
closer to the center of the city. Boats were going up and down the
river, and as they cut the water they left in the air a damp and
succinct odor, like the smell of fresh earth that follows a plow.
Another nurse and child were the only other people in the park.
Mrs. Harley told Deborah to go play in the sand. Then Deborah
saw the dead pigeon. "The pigeon is sleeping," Deborah said. She
stooped
down
to
touch
its
wings.
"That dirty bird is dead, and don't you dare touch it!" Mrs. Harley
shouted.
"The pretty pigeon is sleeping," Deborah said. Her face clouded
suddenly and tears came into her eyes. She stood with her hands
folded in front of her and her head bowed, an attitude that was a
comical imitation of Mrs. Harley's reaction to sorrow, but the grief
in her voice and her face came straight from her heart.
"Get away from that dirty bird!" Mrs. Harley shouted, and she got
up and kicked the dead bird aside. "Go play in the sand," she told
Deborah. "I don't know what's the matter with you. They must have
given twenty-five dollars for that doll carriage you have up in your
room, but you'd rather play with a dead bird. Go look at the river.
Go look at the boats! And don't climb up on that railing, either, for
you'll drop in, and with that terrible current that will be the end of
you." Deborah walked obediently over to he river. "Here I am,"
Mrs. Harley said to the other nurse, "here I am, a woman going on
sixty who lived forty years in a house of her own, sitting on a park
bench like any old bum on a Sunday morning while the baby's
parents are up there on the tenth floor sleeping off last night's
liquor." The other nurse was a well-bred Scotch woman who was
not interested in Mrs. Harley. Mrs. Harley turned her attention to
the steps leading down to the park from Sutton Place, to watch for
Renee Hall. The arrangement between them had been established
for
about
a
month.
Renee Hall had met Mrs. Harley and the child at the Tennysons',
where she had frequently been a guest for cocktails that winter. She
had been brought there by a business friend of Katherine's. She was
pleasant and entertaining, and Katherine had been impressed with
her clothes. She lived around the corner and didn't object to late
invitations and most men liked her. The Tennysons knew nothing
about her other than that she was an attractive guest and did some
radio
acting.
On the evening when Renee first went to the Tennysons', Deborah
had been brought in to say good night, and the actress and the
neglected child had sat together on a sofa. There was an odd
sympathy between the two, and Renee let the child play with her
jewelry and her furs. Renee was kind to Deborah, for she was at a
time in her life when she appreciated kindness herself.
She was about thirty-five years old, dissipated and gentle. She liked
to think of the life she was living as an overture to something
wonderful, final, and even conventional, that would begin with the
next season or the season after that, but she was finding this hope
more and more difficult to sustain. She had begun to notice that she
always felt tired unless she was drinking. It was just that she didn't
have the strength. When she was not drinking she was depressed,
and when she was depressed she quarrelled with headwaiters and
hairdressers, accused people in restaurants of staring at her, and
quarrelled with some of the men who paid her debts. She knew this
instability in her temperament well, and was clever at concealing it
— among other things -from casual friends like the Tennysons.
Renee had come to the house again a week later, and when
Deborah heard her voice, she escaped from Mrs. Harley and flew
down the hall. The child's adoration excited Renee. They sat
together again. Renee wore a string of furs and a hat piled with,
cloth roses, and Deborah thought her the most beautiful lady in the
world.
After that, Renee went to the Tennysons' often. It was a standing
joke that she came there to see the child and not the Tennysons or
their guests. Renee had always wanted children of her own, and
now all her regrets seemed centered in Deborah's bright face. She
began to feel possessive toward the child. She sent her expensive
clothes and toys. "Has she ever been to the dentist?" she asked
Katherine. "Are you sure of your doctor? Have you entered her in
nursery school?" She made the mistake one night of suggesting that
Deborah saw too little of her parents and lacked the sense of
security they should give her. "She has eight thousand dollars in the
bank in her own name," Katherine said. She was angry. Renee
continued to send Deborah elaborate presents. Deborah named all
her dolls and her pleasures after Renee, and on several nights she
cried for Renee after she had been put to bed. Robert and Katherine
thought it would be better if they didn't see Renee any more. They
stopped asking her to the house. "After all," Katherine said, "I've
always felt that there was something unsavory about that girl."
Renee called them twice and asked them for cocktails, and
Katherine said no, no thanks, they were all suffering with colds.
Renee knew that Katherine was lying and she determined to forget
the Tennysons. She missed the little girl, but she might never have
seen her again if it hadn't been for something that happened later
that week. One night she left a dull party early in the evening and
went home by herself. She was afraid of missing telephone calls
and she used a telephone-answering service. They told her that
night that a Mrs. Walton had called and left a number, Walton,
Walton, Walton, Renee thought, and then she remembered that she
had once had a lover named Walton. That would have been eight or
ten years ago. She had once been taken to dinner with his mother,
who was visiting from Cleveland. She remembered the evening
clearly then. Walton drank too much and his mother had taken
Renee aside and told her what a good influence she thought she
was, and couldn't she make him stop drinking and go to church
oftener? Walton and she had quarrelled over his drinking, in the
end, Renee remembered, and she had never seen him after that. He
might be sick, or drunk, or getting married. She had no idea how
old he was, because the thirties were all jumbled in her memory
and she could not tell the beginning of the decade from its end. She
dialed the number. It was a hotel on the West Side. Walton's voice,
when she answered, was the small, cracked voice of an old woman.
"Billy's dead, Renee," she said. She began to sob. "I'm so glad you
called. He's going to be buried tomorrow. I wish you'd come to the
funeral.
I
feel
so
alone."
Renee put on a black dress the next day and took a cab to the
funeral parlor. As soon as she opened the door, she was in the
hands of a gloved and obsequious usher, ready to sympathize with
a grief more profound and sedate than any grief of hers would ever
be. An elevator took her up to the chapel. When she heard the
electric organ playing "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!" she
thought she would have to sit down before she had the strength to
see Mrs. Walton, and then she saw Mrs. Walton standing by the
open door of the chapel. The two women embraced, and Renee was
introduced to Mrs. Walton's sister, a Mrs. Henlein. They were the
only people there. At the far end of the room, under a meagre show
of gladioli, lay her dead lover. "He was so alone, Renee dear," Mrs.
Walton said. "He was so terribly alone. He died alone, you know,
in that furnished room." Mrs. Walton began to cry. Mrs. Henlein
cried. A minister came in and the service began. Renee knelt and
tried to remember the Lord's Prayer, but she got no further than
"...on earth as it is in Heaven." She began to cry, but not because
she remembered the man tenderly; she had not remembered him for
years and it was only by forcing her memory that she could recall
that he sometimes brought her breakfast in bed, and that he sewed
the buttons on his own shirts. She cried for herself, she cried
because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night,
because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and
empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she
could
seethe
rough,
brutal
shape
of
a
coffin.
The three women left the chapel, helped by the obsequious usher,
and rode down in the elevator. Renee said she couldn't go to the
cemetery, that she had an appointment. Her hands were shaking
with fright. She kissed Mrs. Walton goodbye and took a taxi to
Sutton Place. She walked down to the little park where Deborah
and
Mrs.
Harley
would
be.
Deborah saw Renee first. She called Renee's name and ran toward
her, struggling up the steps one at a time. Renee picked her up.
"Pretty Renee," the little girl said. "Pretty, pretty Renee." Renee
and the child sat down beside Mrs. Harley. "If you want to go
shopping," she said, "I'll take Deborah for a few hours."
"Now, I don't know whether I ought to or not," Mrs. Harley said.
"She'll be perfectly safe with me," Renee said. "I'll take her up to
my apartment and you can call for her there at five. Mr. and Mrs.
Tennyson
needn't
know."
"Well, maybe I'll do that, now," Mrs. Harley said. In this way, Mrs.
Harley had begun an arrangement that gave her a few free hours
each
week.
When Renee hadn't come by half past ten that Sunday, Mrs. Harley
knew that she wasn't coming, and she was disappointed because
she had counted on going to church that morning. She thought of
the Latin and the bells, and the exhilarating sense of having been
sanctified and cleansed that she always felt when she got up from
her knees. lt angered her to think that Renee was lying in bed and
that only Renee's laziness was keeping her from prayer. As the
morning passed, a lot of children had come to the park, and now
she looked for Deborah's yellow coat in the crowd.
The warm sun excited the little girl. She was running with a few
children of her age. They were skipping and singing and circling
the sand pile with no more purpose than swallows. Deborah tagged
a little behind the others, because her coordination was still
impulsive and she sometimes threw herself to the ground with her
own exertions. Mrs. Harley called to her, and she ran obediently to
the old woman and leaned on her knees and began to talk about
some lions and little boys. Mrs. Harley asked if she would like to
go and see Renee. "I want to go and stay with Renee," the little girl
said. Mrs. Harley took her hand and they climbed the steps out of
the playground and walked to the apartment house where Renee
lived. Mrs. Harley called upstairs on the house phone, and Renee
answered after a little delay. She sounded sleepy. She said she
would be glad to watch the child for an hour if Mrs. Harley would
bring her upstairs. Mrs. Harley took Deborah up to the fifteenth
Hoor and said goodbye to her there. Renee was wearing a negligee
trimmed with feathers, and her apartment was dark. Renee closed
the door and picked the little girl up in her arms. Deborah's skin
and hair were soft and fragrant, and Renee kissed her, tickled her,
and blew down her neck until the child nearly suffocated with
laughter. Then Renee pulled up the blinds and let some light into
the room. The place was dirty and the air was sour. There were
whiskey glasses and spilled ashtrays, and some dead roses in a
tarnished
silver
bowl.
Renee had a lunch date, and she explained this to Deborah. "I'm
going to the Plaza for lunch," she said. "I'm going to take a bath
and dress, and you'll have to be a good girl." She gave Deborah her
jewel box and turned on the water in the bathtub. Deborah sat
quietly at the dressing table and loaded herself with necklaces and
clips. While Renee was drying herself, the doorbell rang, and she
put on a wrapper and went out to the living room. Deborah
followed
her.
A
man
was
there.
"I'm driving up to Albany," he told Renee. "Why don't you put
some things in a bag and come on up with me? I'll drive you back
on
Wednesday."
"I'd love to, darling," Renee said, "but I can't. I'm having lunch with
Helen Foss. She thinks she might be able to get me some work."
"Call
off
the
lunch,"
the
man
said.
"Come
on."
"I can't, darling," Renee said. "I'll see you on Wednesday."
"Who's
the
kid?"
the
man
asked.
"It's the Tennysons' little girl. I take care of her while the nurse
goes to church." The man embraced Renee vigorously and kissed
her and left after they arranged to meet Wednesday night.
"That was your rich Uncle Loathsome," Renee told the child.
"I have a friend. Her name is Martha," the little girl said.
"Yes, I'm sure you have a friend named Martha," Renee said. She
noticed that the child was scowling and that her eyes were full of
tears. "What's the matter, darling?" she asked. "What is the matter?
Here, here, you sit on the sofa and listen to the radio. I've got to fix
my face." She went into the bedroom to arrange her face and brush
her
hair.
A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time it was Mrs.
Harley. "Did you enjoy the service?" Renee asked. "I'll put on
Deborah's coat." She looked for the hat and coat. They were not
where she had left them, and the child was not in the living room.
Her heart began to beat fiercely. She went into her bedroom. "It
does my soul so much good to go to church," she heard Mrs.
Harley say. Renee thought in terror of the open windows. The
window in her bedroom was open. She looked out, and fifteen
stories below she could see the sidewalk and the canopy and the
doorman at the corner whistling for a cab and a blonde walking a
poodle.
Renee
ran
back
to
the
living
room.
"Where's
Deborah?"
Mrs.
Harley
asked.
"I was dressing," Renee said. "She was in here a minute ago. She
must have slipped out. She could have opened the door herself."
"You mean you've lost the little girl!" Mrs. Harley shouted.
"Please don't get excited," Renee said. "She can't have gone very
far. The only way she could get downstairs would be the elevators."
She went out the kitchen door and rang for the service elevator. She
noticed the perilous service stairs. They were made of iron and
concrete, painted a dirty gray, and they fell fifteen stories to the
ground. She listened down the stair well, but all she could hear was
the hiss of cooking and someone, way below, singing,
I'm a soldier, in the army of the Lord, I'm a soldier, In the army...
The service elevator was full of stinking garbage. "There was a
little girl in my apartment," Renee said to the man who had brought
the elevator up. "She's disappeared. Would you look for her?" Then
she ran into the front hall and rang for the passenger elevator.
"Why, yes," the man said. "I took a little girl down, about ten
minutes ago. She had on a yellow coat." Renee smelled whiskey on
his breath. She called to Mrs. Harley. Then she went back into the
apartment to get some cigarettes. "I'm not going to stay here by
myself," Mrs. Harley said. Renee pushed her into a chair. She
closed the door and rode down in the elevator. "I thought it was
strange, her going down by herself," the elevator man said. "I
thought maybe she was going to meet somebody in the lobby." As
he spoke, Renee smelled the whiskey on his breath again. "You've
been drinking," she said. "If you hadn't been drinking, this wouldn't
have happened. You ought to know that a child of that age can't be
left alone. You ought not to drink while you're working."
When he reached the ground floor, he brought the elevator to a
sudden stop and slammed the door open. Renee ran into the lobby.
The mirrors, the electric candles, and the doorman's soiled ascot
sickened her. "Yes," the doorman said. "It seems to me that I saw a
little girl go out. I didn't pay much attention to it. I was out there,
trying to get a cab." Renee ran into the street. The child was not
there. She ran down to where she could see the river. She felt
helpless and feeble, as though she had lost her place in the city in
which she had lived for fifteen years. The traffic on the street was
heavy. She stood at the corner with her hands cupped to her mouth
and
screamed,
"Deborah!
Deborah!"
The Tennysons were going out that afternoon, and they had begun
to dress when the telephone rang. Robert answered. Katherine
could hear Renee's voice. "...I know it's a terrible thing, Bob, I
know
I
should
never
have
done
it."
"You
mean
Mrs.
Harley
left
her
with
you?"
"Yes, yes. I know it's a terrible thing. I've looked everywhere. Mrs.
Harley is here now. Do you want her to come over?"
"No."
"Shall
I
call
the
police?"
"No," Robert said. "I'll call the police. Tell me what she was
wearing." When Robert had finished talking with Renee, he called
the police. "I'll wait here until you come up," he said. "Please come
as
quickly
as
you
can."
Katherine was standing in the bathroom doorway. She walked over
to Robert, and he took her in his arms. He held her firmly, and she
began to cry. Then she left his arms and sat on the bed. He went to
the open window. Down in the street he could see a truck with
COMFORT CARPET COMPANY painted on its roof. There were
some tennis courts in the next block, and people were playing
tennis. There was a hedge of privet around the tennis courts, and an
old woman was cutting some privet with a knife. She wore a round
hat and a heavy winter coat that reached to her ankles. He realized
that she was stealing the privet. She worked quickly and furtively,
and she kept looking over her shoulder to make sure that no one
saw her. When she had cut a good bunch of the green branches, she
stuffed them into a bag and hurried down the street.
The doorbell rang. A police sergeant and a plain-clothesman were
there. They took off their hats. "This kind of thing is hard on the
ladies," the sergeant said. "Now, if you'd give me the facts again,
Mr. Tennyson. We already have men looking for her. You say she
went down in the elevator herself. That was about an hour ago." He
checked all the facts with Robert. "Now, I don't want to alarm
either of you," he said, "but would anyone have any reason to
kidnap the child? We have to consider every possibility."
"Yes," Katherine said suddenly and in a strong voice. She got up
and began to walk back and forth in the room. "It may be
unreasonable, but it's at least worth considering. She may have
been kidnapped. I've seen that woman in the neighborhood twice
this week and I had a feeling that she was following me. I didn't
think anything about it then. And she did write me that letter. I'm
not making myself clear. You see, before we had Mrs. Harley to
take care of Deborah, we had a woman named Mrs. Emerson. I
quarrelled with her about Deborah, and she told me, while we were
quarrelling — I never told you any of this, darling, because I didn't
want to worry you and I didn't think any of it was important — but
when we quarrelled, she said the child would be taken away from
me. I tried to forget about it, because I thought she was eccentric.
The city is full of strange women like that. Then I saw her on the
street twice this week, and I had a sense that she was following me.
She lives at the Hotel Princess. It's on the West Side. At least, she
used
to
live
there."
"I'll go over," Robert said. "I'll get the car." "I'll drive you over, Mr.
Tennyson," the sergeant said. "Do you want to come?" Robert
asked Katherine. "No, darling," Katherine said. "I'll be all right."
Robert put on his hat, and he and the sergeant left. The elevator
man spoke to Robert. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Tennyson," he said. "We
all loved her in this house. I telephoned my wife and she went right
over to St. John's and lit a vigil light for the little girl."
There was a police car in front of the house, and Robert and the
sergeant got into it and drove west. Robert kept turning his head
from side to side, and he did this to avert his eyes from the image
of the child's death. He imagined the accident in the cliches of
"Drive Safely" posters, badly drawn and in crude colors. He saw a
stranger carrying the limp body away from the fenders of a taxi; he
saw the look of surprise and horror on a lovely face that had never
known any horror; he heard the noise of horns, the shrieking of
brakes; he saw a car coming over the rise of a hill. He made a
physical effort to force his eyes to look beyond these images into
the
bright
street.
The day had got hot. A few low, swift clouds touched the city with
shadow, and he could see the fast darkness travelling from block to
block. The streets were crowded. He saw the city only in terms of
mortal danger. Each manhole cover, excavation, and flight of stairs
dominated the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a
film negative, and he thought the crowds and the green trees in
Central Park looked profane. The Hotel Princess was on a dingy
street in the West Seventies. The air in the lobby was fetid. The
desk clerk became uneasy when he saw the policeman. He looked
for Mrs. Emerson's key and said that she was in. There was no
telephone
in
her
room.
They
could
go
up.
They went up in an elevator cage of gilded iron, driven by an old
man. They knocked on the door, and Mrs. Emerson told them to
come in. Robert had never known the woman. He had only seen her
when she stood in the doorway of the nursery and sent Deborah in
to say good night. She was English, he remembered. Her voice had
always sounded troubled and refined. "Oh, Mr. Tennyson," she said
when she recognized him. The sergeant asked her suddenly where
she
had
been
that
morning.
"It's all right, Mrs. Emerson," Robert said. He was afraid she would
become hysterical and tell them nothing. "Deborah ran away this
morning. We thought you might know something about it. Mrs.
Tennyson
said
you
wrote
her
a
letter."
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry to hear about Deborah," she said. It was the
fine, small voice of someone who knew her place as a lady. "Yes,
yes. Of course I wrote that letter to Mrs. Tennyson. It came to me
in a dream that you would lose the little girl unless you were very
careful. I have a profession, you know. I interpret dreams. I told
Mrs. Tennyson when I left her that she should take very good care
of the little girl. She was born, after all, under that dreadful new
planet, Pluto. I was on the Riviera when they discovered it, in 1938.
We knew something dreadful was going to happen then."
"I loved the little girl dearly and I regretted my disagreement with
Mrs. Tennyson," she went on. "The little girl was one of the fire
people — banked fire. I gave her palm a good deal of study. We
were left alone a great deal, of course. She had a long life line and a
good sense of balance and a good head. There were signs of
imprudence there, but a great deal of that would depend upon you. I
saw deep water there and some great danger, some great hazard.
That's why I wrote the letter to Mrs. Tennyson. I never charged
Mrs. Tennyson for any of my professional services."
"What did you and Mrs. Tennyson fight about?" the sergeant
asked.
"We're
wasting
time,"
Robert
said.
"We're wasting so much time. Let's go back." He got up and went
out of the room, and the sergeant followed him. It took them a long
time to drive back. The Sunday crowds crossing the streets stopped
them at every intersection. The plainclothesman was waiting in
front of the house. "You'd better go up and see your wife," he told
Robert. Neither the doorman nor the elevator man spoke to him. He
stepped into his apartment and called to Katherine. She was in their
bedroom, sitting by the window. She had a black book in her lap.
He saw that it was the Bible. It was a Gideon copy that a drunken
friend of theirs had stolen from a hotel. They had used it once or
twice as a reference. Beyond the open window, he could see the
river, a wide, bright field of light. The room was very still.
"What
about
Mrs.
Emerson?"
Katherine
asked.
"It was a mistake. It was a mistake to think that she would hurt the
child."
"Renee called again. She took Mrs. Harley home. She wants us to
telephone her when we find Deborah. I never want to see Renee
again."
"I
know."
"If anything happens to Deborah," Katherine said, "I can never
forgive myself. I can never forgive myself. I'll feel as though we
had sacrificed her. I've been reading about Abraham." She opened
the Bible and began to read. " 'And he said, Take now thy son,
thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest and get thee into the land of
Moriah; and offer him there for aburnt offering upon one of the
mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in
the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men
with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt
offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had
told him.'" She closed the book. "The thing I'm afraid of is that I'll
go out of my mind. I keep repeating our address and telephone
number to myself. That doesn't make any sense, does it?"
Robert put his hand on her forehead and ran it over her hair. Her
dark hair was parted at the side and brushed simply, like a child's.
"I'm afraid I'm going out of my mind," Katherine said. "You know
what my first impulse was when you left me alone? I wanted to
take a knife, a sharp knife, and go into my closet and destroy my
clothes. I wanted to cut them to pieces. That's because they're so
expensive. That's not a sensible thing to want to do, is it? But I'm
not
insane,
of
course.
I'm
perfectly
rational.
"I had a little brother who died. His name was Charles — Charles,
junior. He was named after my father and he died of some kind of
sickness when he was two and a half years old, about Deborah's
age. Of course it was very hard on Mother and Dad, but it wasn't
anything as bad as this. You see, I think children mean much more
to us than they did to our parents. That's what I've been thinking. I
suppose it's because we're not as religious and because the way we
live makes us much more vulnerable. I feel filthy with guilt. I feel
as though I'd been a rotten mother and a rotten wife and as though
this were punishment. I've broken every vow and every promise
that I've ever made. I've broken all the good promises. When I was
a little girl, I used to make promises on the new moon and the first
snow. I've broken everything good. But I'm talking as though we'd
lost her, and we haven't lost her, have we? They'll find her, the
policeman
said
they'd
find
her."
"They'll
find
her,"
Robert
said.
The room darkened. The low clouds had touched the city. They
could hear the rain as it fell against the building and the windows.
"She's lying somewhere in the rain!" Katherine cried. She
wrenched her body around in the chair and covered her face. "She's
lying
in
the
rain."
"They'll find her," Robert said. "Other children get lost. I've read
stories about it in the Times. This sort of thing happens to everyone
who has children. My sister's little girl fell downstairs. She
fractured her skull. They didn't think she was going to live."
"It does happen to other people, doesn't it?" Katherine asked. She
turned and looked at her husband. The rain had stopped suddenly.
It left in the air a smell as powerful as though ammonia had been
spilled in the streets. Robert saw the rain clouds darken the bright
river. "I mean there are all the sicknesses and the accidents,"
Katherine said, "and we've been so lucky. You know, Deborah
hasn't had any lunch. She'll be terribly hungry. She hasn't had
anything
to
eat
since
breakfast."
"I
know."
"Darling, you go out," Katherine said. "It will be easier for you
than
staying
here."
"What
will
you
do?"
"I'm going to clean the living room. We left the windows open last
night and everything's covered with soot. You go out. I'll be all
right." She smiled. Her face was swollen from crying. "You go out.
It will be easier for you, and I'll clean the room."
Robert went down again. The police car was still parked in front of
the house. A policeman came up to Robert, and they talked for a
while. "I'm going to look around the neighborhood again," the
policeman said, "if you want to come with me." Robert said that he
would go. He noticed that the policeman carried a flashlight.
Near the apartment house was the ruin of a brewery that had been
abandoned during prohibition. The sidewalk had been inherited by
the dogs of the neighborhood and was littered with their filth. The
basement windows of a nearby garage were broken, and the
policemen flashed his light through a window frame. Robert started
when he saw some dirty straw and a piece of yellow paper. It was
the color of Deborah's coat. He said nothing and they walked along.
In the distance he could hear the vast afternoon noise of the city.
There were some tenements near the brewery. They were squalid,
and over the door to one hung a crude sign: "Welcome Home
Jerry." The iron gate that led to the steep cellar stairs was open. The
policeman flashed his light down the stairs. They were broken.
There
was
nothing
there.
An old woman sat on the stoop of the next house, and she watched
them suspiciously when they looked down the cellar stairs. "You'll
not find my Jimmy there," she screamed, "you — you -" Someone
threw open a window and told her to shut up. Robert saw that she
was drunk. The policeman paid no attention to her. He looked
methodically into the cellar of each house, and then they went
around a corner. There were stores, here, along the front of an
apartment
house.
There
were
no
stairs
or
areaways.
Robert heard a siren. He stopped, and stopped the policeman with
him. A police car came around the corner and drew up to the curb
where they stood. "Hop in, Mr. Tennyson," the driver said. "We
found her. She's down at the station." He started the siren, and they
drove east, dodging through the traffic. "We found her down on
Third Avenue," the policeman said. "She was sitting out in front of
an antique store, eating a piece of bread. Somebody must have
given
her
the
bread.
She
isn't
hungry."
She was waiting for him at the station house. He put his hands on
her and knelt in front of her and began to laugh. His eyes were
burning. "Where have you been, Deborah? Who gave you the
bread? Where have you been? Where have you been?"
"The lady gave the bread," she said. "I had to find Martha."
"What lady gave you the bread, Deborah? Where have you been?
Who is Martha? Where have you been?" He knew that she would
never tell him and that as long as he lived he would never know,
and against his palm he could feel the strong beating of her heart,
but he went on asking, "Where have you been? Who gave you the
bread? Who is Martha?"
Clementina
She was born and brought up in Nascosta, in the time of the
wonders — the miracle of the jewels and the winter of the wolves.
She was ten years old when thieves broke into the shrine of the
Holy Virgin after the last Mass on San Giovanni and stole the
jewels that had been given to the Madonna by a princess who was
cured there of a malady of the liver. On the next day, when Uncle
Serafino was walking up from the fields, he saw, in the mouth of
the cave where the Etruscans had buried their dead, a youth of great
radiance, who beckoned to him, but he was afraid and ran away.
Then Serafino was stricken with a fever, and he called for the priest
and told him what he had seen, and the priest went to the cave and
found the jewels of the Madonna there in the dead leaves where the
angel had been standing. That same year, on the road below the
farm, her Cousin Maria saw the Devil, with horns, a pointed tail,
and a tight red suit, just as in the pictures. She was fourteen at the
time of the big snow, and she went that night after dark to the
fountain and, turning back toward the tower where they then lived,
she saw the wolves. It was a pack of six or seven, trotting up the
stairs of the Via Cavour in the snow. She dropped her pitcher and
ran into the tower, and her tongue was swollen with terror, but she
looked out the cracks in the door and saw them, more churlish than
dogs, more ragged, their ribs showing in their mangy coats and the
blood of the sheep they had murdered falling from their mouths.
She was terrified and she was rapt, as if the sight of the wolves
moving over the snow was the spirits of the dead or some other part
of the mystery that she knew to lie close to the heart of life, and
when they had passed she would not have believed she had seen
them if they had not left their tracks in the snow. She was
seventeen when she was to work as a donna di servizio for the
baron of little importance who had a villa on the hill, and it was the
same summer that Antonio, in the dark field, called her his dewy
rose and made her head swim. She confessed to the priest and did
her penance and was absolved, but when this had happened six
times the priest said they should become engaged, and so Antonio
became her fidanzato. The mother of Antonio was not sympathetic,
and after three years Clementina was still his rose and he was still
her fidanzato and whenever the marriage was mentioned the
mother of Antonio would hold her head and scream. In the autumn,
the baron asked her to come to Rome as a donna and how could she
say no when she had dreamed all the nights of her life of seeing the
Pope with her own eyes and walking on streets that were lighted
after
dark
with
electricity?
In Rome she slept on straw and washed in a bucket, but the streets
were a spectacle, although she had to work such hours that she was
not often able to walk in the city. The baron promised to pay her
twelve thousand lire a month, but he paid her nothing at the end of
the first month and nothing at the end of the second, and the cook
said that he often brought girls in from the country and paid them
nothing. Opening the door for him one evening, she asked with
great courtesy for her wages, and he said he had given her a room,
a change of air, and a visit to Rome and that she was badly
educated to ask for more. She had no coat to wear in the street, and
there were holes in her shoes, and all she was given to eat was the
leftovers from the baron's table. She saw that she would have to
find another post, because she didn't have the money to go back to
Nascosta. That next week, the cousin of the cook found her a place
where she was both seamstress and donna, and here she worked
even harder, but when the month was over there were no wages.
Then she refused to finish a dress the signora had asked her to
make for a reception. She said she would not finish the dress until
she had her wages. The signora angered herself and tore her hair,
but she paid the wages. Then that night the cousin of the cook said
that some Americans needed a donna. She put all the dirty dishes in
the oven to give a false appearance of cleanliness, said her prayers
in San Marcel lo, and flew across Rome to where the Americans
lived, feeling that every girl on the street that night was looking for
the same post. The Americans were a family with two boys —
well-educated people, although she could see that they were sad
and foolish. They offered her twenty thousand lire in wages and
showed her a very commodious room where she would live and
said they hoped she would not be uncomfortable, and in the
morning she moved her things to the Americans'.
She had heard much about Americans, about how they were
generous and ignorant, and some of this was true, for they were
very generous and treated her like a guest in the house, always
asking her if she had time to do this and that and urging her to take
a passage in the streets on Thursdays and Sundays. The signore was
meager and tall and worked in the Embassy. His hair was cropped
close like a German or a prisoner or someone recovering from an
operation of the brain. His hair was black and strong, and if he had
let it go and waved it with frissone the girls in the street would have
admired him, but he went each week to the barber and had himself
disfigured. He was very modest in other things and wore at the
beach a concealing bathing costume, but he walked through the
streets of Rome with the shape of his head naked for everyone to
see. The signora was fine, with a skin like marble and many
clothes, and it was a commodious and a diverting life, and
Clementina prayed at San Marcello's that it would never end. They
left all the lights burning as if electricity cost nothing, and they
burned wood in the fireplace only to take off the evening chill, and
they drank iced gin and vermouth before dinner. They smelled
different. It was a pale smell, she thought — a weak smell — and it
might have had something to do with the blood of northerners, or it
might be because they took so many hot baths. They took so many
hot baths that she could not understand why they were not
neurasthenics. They ate Italian food and drank wine, and she hoped
that if they ate enough pasta and oil they would have a strong and
wholesome smell. Sometimes when she waited on table, she
smelled them, but it was always a very weak smell and sometimes
nothing. They spoiled their children, and sometimes the children
spoke sharply or in an ill temper to their genitori, for which they
should have been whipped, but they never whipped their children,
these strangers, or even raised their voices in anger, or did anything
else that would explain to the children the importance of
their genitori, and once when the smallest boy was very badly
disposed and should have been whipped, his mother took him
instead to a toy store and bought him a sailboat. And sometimes
when they were dressing to go out in the evening the signore would
fasten his wife's clothes or her pearls, like a cafone, instead of
ringing for Clementina. And once when there was no water in the
flat and she had gone down the stairs to the fountain to get some,
he came after her to help, and when she said that it was not possible
for him to carry water, he said that it was not possible for him to sit
by his fire while a young woman carried a heavy demijohn up and
down the stairs. Then he took the demijohn out of her hands and
went down to the fountain, where he could be seen getting water by
the porter and all the other servants in the palace, and she watched
this from the kitchen window and was so angry and ashamed that
she had to take some wine for her stomach, for everyone would say
that she was lazy and that she worked for a vulgar and badly
educated family. And they did not believe in the dead. Once,
walking down the sala in the dusk, she saw the spirit of a dead man
before her so clearly that at first she thought it was the signore,
until she saw him standing in the door. Then she screamed and
dropped the tray with the glasses and bottles on it, and when the
signore asked her why she had screamed and she said it was
because she had seen a ghost he was not sympathetic. And once, in
the back hall, she saw another ghost, the ghost of a bishop with a
mitre, and when she screamed and told the signore what she had
seen
he
was
not
sympathetic.
But the children were sympathetic, and in the evening, when they
were in bed, she told them the stories of Nascosta. The story they
liked best was of the young farmer in Nascosta who was married to
a beautiful woman named Assunta. When they had been married a
year, they had a fine son with dark curls and a golden skin, but
from the first he was sickly, and he cried, and they thought there
was a spell on him, and they took him to the doctor in Conciliano,
riding all the way there on an asino, and the doctor said the baby
was dying of starvation. But how could this be, they asked, for the
breasts of Assunta were so full of milk they stained her blouse. But
the doctor said to watch at night, and they went home by asino and
ate their supper, and Assunta fell asleep, but the husband stayed
awake to watch, and then at midnight he saw in the moonlight a
great viper come over the threshold of the farmhouse and come into
the bed and suck the milk from the breasts of the woman, but the
husband could not move, for if he moved, the viper would have put
his fangs into her breast and killed her, and when the serpent had
sucked her breasts dry he went back across the floor and over the
threshold in the moonlight, and then the farmer gave the alarm, and
all the farmers from around came, and they found against the wall
of the farm a nest of eight great serpents, fat with milk, who were
so poisonous that even their breath was mortal, and they beat them
to death with clubs, and this was a true story, because she had
passed the farm where it happened a hundred times. And the story
they preferred after this was of the lady in Conciliano who became
the lover of a handsome stranger from America. But one night she
noticed on his back a small mark like a leaf and remembered that
the son who had been taken away from her many years ago was so
marked, and knew then that this lover was her son. She ran then to
the church to ask forgiveness in the confessional, but the priest —
he was a fat and a haughty man -said there was no forgiveness for
her sin and, subito, there was in the confessional a loud clatter of
bones. Then the people came and opened the confessional and saw
that where there had been a proud and a haughty priest there was
nothing but bones. And she also told the children about the miracle
of the jewels of the Madonna, and the tempo in fame when she had
seen the wolves coming up the Via Cavour, and the time her
Cousin Maria had seen the Devil in his red suit.
She went with this American family to the mountains in July, and
in August to Venice and, coming back to Rome in the fall, she
understood them to say that they were leaving Italy, and they had
the trunks brought up from the cellar, and she helped the signora
with the packing. Now she had five pairs of shoes and eight dresses
and money in the bank, but the thought of looking for another post
with a Roman signora who might spit in her eye whenever she felt
like it was discouraging, and one day when she was repairing a
dress for the signora she became so discouraged that she cried.
Then she explained to the signora how hard the life of a donna was
working for Romans, and the signora said they would take her to
the new world if she liked. They would take her for six months on
an impermanent visa; it would be diverting for her and a help to
them. Then all the arrangements were made, and she went to
Nascosta, and the Mamma cried and asked her not to go, and
everyone in the village said she should not go, but this was
jealousy, because they had never had a chance to go anywhere —
not even Conciliano. And for once the world where she had lived
and been so happy seemed to her truly to be an old world where the
customs and the walls were older than the people, and she felt that
she would be happier in a world where the walls were all new, even
if
the
people
were
savage.
When the time came to go, they drove to Naples, stopping
whenever the signore felt like it to have a little coffee and cognac,
traveling very commodiously like millionaires and staying in a dilusso hotel in Naples, where she had room to herself. But on the
morning when they sailed she felt a great sadness, for who can live
out a good life but in his own country? Then she told herself that it
was only a voyage — she would come home in six months — and
what had the good God made the world so strange and various for
if it was not to be seen? She had her passport stamped and went
aboard the ship feeling very emotional. It was an American ship, as
cold as winter, and at lunch there was ice water on the table, and
what was not cold was flavorless and badly cooked, and she came
back to her deep feeling that, while these people were kind and
generous, they were ignorant and the man fastened their wives'
pearls and, with all their money, they did not know any better than
to eat platefuls of raw steak washed down with coffee that tasted
like medicine. They were not beautiful or elegant and they had pale
eyes, but what disgusted her most on the ship were the old women,
who in the country would be wearing black in memory of their
numerous dead and, as suited their time of life, would move slowly
and inspire dignity. But here the old ladies spoke in shrill voices
and wore bright clothes and as much jewelry, all of it false, as you
would find on the Madonna of Nascosta, and painted their faces
and tinted their hair. But who was deceived, for you could see how
haggard under the paint were their cheeks, and that their necks
were rucked and seamed like the necks of turtles, and although they
smelled like the campagna in spring they were as withered and dry
as the flowers on a tomb. They were like straw, and this must be a
savage country where the old had no wisdom or taste and did not
deserve or receive the respect of their children and their
grandchildren
and
had
forgotten
their
dead.
But it would be beautiful, she thought, because she had seen in
magazines and newspapers photographs of the towers of the city of
New York, towers of gold and silver, against the blue sky, in a city
that had never once been touched by the damage of war. But it was
raining when they came up the Narrows, and when she looked for
the towers they were not to be seen, and when she asked for the
towers she was told they were lost in the rain. She was
disappointed, for what she could see of this new world seemed
ugly, and all the people who dreamed of it were deceived. It was
like Naples in the time of the war, and she wished she had not
come. The customs man who went through her bags was badly
educated. They took a taxi and a train to Washington, the capital of
the new world, and then another taxi, and she could see out of the
window that all the buildings were copies of the buildings of
Imperial Rome, and they looked ghostly to her in the night lights,
as if the Forum had risen again from the dust. They drove into the
country where the houses were all of wood and all new and where
the washbasins and bathtubs were very commodious, and in the
morning her signora showed her the machines and how to work
them.
At first she was suspicious of the washing machine, for it used a
fortune in soap and hot water and did riot clean the clothes, and it
reminded her of how happy she had been at the fountain in
Nascosta, talking with her friends and making everything as clean
as new. But little by little the machine seemed to her more carina,
for it was after all only a machine and it filled itself and emptied
itself and turned around and around, and it seemed marvelous to
her that a machine could remember so much and was always there,
ready and waiting to do its work. And then there was the machine
for washing the dishes, and you could wash the dishes in a costume
for the evening without getting a drop of water on your gloves.
When the signora was away and the boys were at school, first she
would put some dirty clothes in the washing machine and start that,
and then she would put some dirty dishes in the other machine and
start that, and then she would put a nice saltimbocca alla romana in
the electric frying pan and start that, and then she would sit in the
salone in front of the TV and listen to all the machines around her
doing the work, and it delighted her and made her feel powerful.
Then there was the frigidario in the kitchen, making ice and
keeping the butter as hard as stone, and there was the deep freeze
full of lamb and beef as fresh as the day when they had been killed,
and there was an electric egg beater, and a machine for squeezing
the oranges, and a machine for breathing in the dust, and she would
have them all going at once, and a machine for making the toast —
all bright silver — where you put in the plain bread and turned your
back and allora, there were two pieces of toast just the color you
had asked for, and all done by the machine.
During the day, her signore was away at the office, but her signora,
who in Rome had lived like a princess, seemed in the new world to
he a secretary, and she thought perhaps that they were poor and the
signora must work. She was always talking on the telephone and
making computations and writing letters like a secretary. She was
always hurried during the day and tired at night, like a secretary.
Because they were both tired at night, the house was not as
peaceful as it had been in Rome. Finally she asked the signora to
explain what she was a secretary for, and the signora said that she
was not a secretary but that she was kept busy raising money for
the poor and the sick and the mad. This seemed to Clementina very
strange. The climate also seemed to her strange and humid, bad for
the lungs and the liver, but the trees at that season were very
colorful — she had never seen this before; they were gold and red
and yellow, and their leaves fell through the air as in some great
hall in Rome or Venice where the paint is flaking from the pictures
on
the
ceiling.
There was a paisano, an old man they called Joe, from bas-Italia,
who delivered the milk. He had sixty years or more and was bent
with carrying milk bottles, but she went with him to the movies,
where he could explain the story to her in Italian and where he
pinched her and asked her to marry him. This was a joke, as far as
Clementina was concerned. There were strange festas in the new
world — one with a turkey and no saints — and then there was
the festa of the Natale, and she herself had never seen anything so
discourteous to the Holy Virgin and the sainted baby. First they
bought a green tree and then they put it up in the salone and hung it
with shining necklaces, as if it were a holy saint with the power of
curing evil and hearing prayers. Mamma, mia. A tree! She was
confessed by a priest who gave her the tail of the Devil for not
coming to church every Sunday of her life and who was very rigid.
When she went to Mass, they took the collection three times. She
thought that when she returned to Rome she would write an article
for the paper about the church in this new world where there was
not even the wrist-bone of a saint to kiss and where they made
offerings to a green tree and forgot the travail of the Holy Virgin
and took the collection three times. And then there was the snow,
but it was more carina than the snow in Nascosta — there were no
wolves, and the signori skied in the mountains, and the children
played in the snow and the house was always warm.
She still went with Joe every Sunday to the movies, where he told
her the story, asked her to marry him, and pinched her. Once,
before the movies, he stopped at a fine house all made of wood and
neatly painted, and he unlocked the door and took her upstairs to a
nice apartment with paper on the walls, the floor shining with
varnish, and five rooms in all, with a modern bathroom, and he said
that if she would marry him it would all be hers. He would buy her
a machine for washing the dishes and a machine for beating the
eggs and a frying pan like the signora had that knew when to turn
off the saltimbocca alla romana. When she asked him where he
would find all the money to do this, he said that he had saved
seventeen thousand dollars, and he took a book out of his pocket, a
bank-book, and there was stamped in it seventeen thousand two
hundred and thirty dollars and seventeen cents. It would all be hers
if she would come and be his wife. She said no, but after the
movies, when she was in bed, it made her sad to think of all the
machinery and she wished that she had never come to the new
world. Nothing would ever be the same again. When she went back
to Nascosta and told them that a man — not a beautiful man, but
one who was honest and gentle — had offered her seventeen
thousand dollars and a place with five rooms, they would never
believe her. They would think she was crazy, and how could she lie
again on straw in a cold room and be contented? Her impermanent
visa expired in April and she would have to go home then, but the
signore said that he could apply for an extension if she liked, and
she begged him to do this. In the kitchen one night, she heard them
speaking in low voices and she guessed they were speaking about
her affairs, but he did not speak to her until much later when the
others had gone up and she came into the room to say good night.
"I'm very sorry, Clementina," he said, "but they won't give me an
extension."
"It doesn't matter," she said. "If I am not wanted in this country, I
will
go
home."
"It isn't that, Clementina, it's the law. I'm very sorry. Your visa
expires on the twelfth. I'll get your passage on a boat before then."
"Thank you, Signore," she said. "Good night." She would go back,
she thought. She would take the boat, she would debark at Naples,
she would catch a train at the Mergellina and in Rome a pullman,
and go out the Tiburtina with the curtains of the bus swaying and
the purple clouds of exhaust rolling out behind them when they
climbed the hill at Tivoli. Her eyes filled with tears when she
thought of kissing Mamma and giving her the silver-framed
photograph of Dana Andrews that she had bought at Woolworth's
for her present. Then she would sit on the piazza with such a ring
of people around her as would form for an accident, speaking in her
own tongue and drinking the wine they had made and talking about
the new world where there were frying pans with brains and where
even the powder for cleaning the gabinetti smelled of roses. She
saw the scene distinctly, the fountain spray blowing on the wind,
but then she saw gathering in the imagined faces of her townsmen a
look of disbelief. Who would believe her tales? Who would listen?
They would have admired her if she had seen the Devil, like
Cousin Maria, but she had seen a sort of paradise and no one cared.
In leaving one world and coming to another she had lost both.
Then she opened and reread a package of letters written from
Nascosta by lier Uncle Sebastiano. That night, his letters all seemed
dolorous. The autumn had come on quickly, he wrote, and it was
cold, even in September, and many of the olives and the grapes
were lost, and la bomba atomica had ruined the seasons of Italy.
Now the shadow of the town fell over the valley earlier, and she
remembered herself the beginnings of winter — the sudden
hoarfrost lying on the grapes and wild flowers, and
the contadini coming in at dark on their asini, loaned down with
roots and other scraps of wood, for wood was hard to find in that
country and one would ride ten kilometri for a bundle of green
olive cuttings, and she could remember the cold in her bones and
see the asini against the yellow light of evening and hear the lonely
noise of stones falling down the steep path, falling away from their
hoofs. And in December Sebastiano wrote that it was again the
time of the wolves. The tempo infame had come again to Nascosta,
and wolves had killed six of thepadrone's sheep, and there was
no abbacchio, and no eggs, either, for pasta, and the piazza was
buried in snow up to the edge of the fountain, and they knew
hunger and cold, and she could remember both.
The room where she read these letters was warm. The lights were
pink. She had a silver ashtray, like a signora, and, if she had
wanted, in her private bathroom she could have drawn a hot bath
up to her neck. Did the Holy Virgin mean for her to live in a
wilderness and die of starvation? Was it wrong to take the comforts
that were held out to her? The faces of her people appeared to her
again, and how dark were their skin, their hair, and their eyes, she
thought, as if through living with fair people she had taken on the
dispositions and the prejudices of the fair. The faces seeined to
regard her with reproach, with earthern patience, with a sweet,
dignified, and despairing regard, but why should she be compelled
to return and drink sour wine in the darkness of the hills? In this
new world they had found the secret of youth, and would the saints
in Heaven have refused a life of youth-fulness if it had been God's
will. She remembered how in Nascosta even the most beautiful fell
quickly under the darkness of time, like flowers without care; how
even the most beautiful became bent and toothless, their dark
clothes smelling, as the Mamma's did, of smoke and manure. But in
this country she could have forever white teeth and color in her
hair. Until the day she died she would have shoes with heels and
rings on her fingers, and the attention of men, for in this new world
one lived ten lifetimes and never felt the pinch of age; no, never.
She would marry Joe. She would stay here and live ten lives, with a
skin like marble and always the teeth with which to bite the meat.
On the next night, her signore told her when the boats were leaving,
and when he had finished she said, "I am not going back."
"I
don't
"I
"But
"Joe
"And
understand."
will
Joe's
a
great
marry
deal
is
older
than
Joe."
you,
Clementina."
sixty-three."
you?"
"I
"Do
am
you
twenty-four."
love
Joe?"
"Oh no, Signore. How could I love him, with his big paunch like a
sackful of apples and so many wrinkles at the back of his neck you
could tell your fortune there? It is not possible."
"Clementina, I admire Joe," the signore said. "He's an honest man.
If
you
marry him,
you
must
care
for
him."
"Oh, I'll care for him, Signore. I'll make his bed and cook his
supper, but
I will
never let him touch me."
He deliberated, looked down at the floor, and finally said, "I will
not
let
you
marry
Joe,
Clementina."
"But
why?"
"I won't let you marry him unless you'll be his wife. You must love
him."
"But, Signore, in Nascosta there would be no sense in marrying a
man whose land did not adjoin yours, and does that mean then that
your
heart
will
fly
out
to
him?"
"This
is
not
Nascosta."
"But all marriages are like this, Signore. If people married for love,
the world would not be a place in which to live, it would be a
hospital for the mad. Did not the Signora marry you because of the
money and the conveniences you bring her?" He did not answer,
but he saw his face flush dark with blood. "Oh, Signore, my
Signore," she said, "you talk like a boy with stars in your eyes, a
thin boy at the fountain, his head full of the poesia. I am only trying
to unfold to you that I am only marrying Joe so that I can stay in
this country, and you are talking like a boy."
"I am not talking like a boy," he said. Then he rose from the chair.
"I am not talking like a boy. Who do you think you are? When you
came to us in Rome you didn't have shoes or a coat."
"Signore, you do not understand me. Perhaps I will love him, but I
am only trying to unfold to you that I am not marrying for love."
"And that's what I'm trying to explain to you. I won't stand for it."
"I
will
leave
"I'm
"No,
"Then
your
house,
responsible
Signore.
get
Joe
Signore."
for
you."
is
responsible
for
out
of
my
me
now."
house."
She went upstairs to her rokm and cried and cried, in anger and pity
for this grown fool, but she packed her things. In the morning she
cooked the breakfast, but she stayed in the kitchen until the signore
had gone to work, and then the signora came down and cried, and
the children cried, and at noon Joe came to get her in his car and
took her to the Pelluchis, who were paisani and with whom she
would stay until she and Joe were married. Maria Pelluchi
explained to her that in the new world one was married like a
princess, and this was so. For three weeks she was in and out of the
stores with Maria — first to buy the wedding dress for herself, all
white and the latest mode, with a tail of satin to drag along the
ground, but economical, too, because the tail could be adjusted,
making the dress like a costume for the grand evening. Then there
were the costumes for Maria and her sister, who would be the
attendants, and these were yellow and lavender and could be used
later as costumes for the evening. Then there were the shoes and
the flowers and the clothes for traveling and the suitcase, and
nothing was rented. And when the day of the wedding arrived she
was so tired that she had milk in the knees and walked through it all
like a dream, of which she could remember very little. There were
many paisani at the reception and much wine, food, and music, and
then she took with Joe a train to New York, where the buildings
were so tall they made her feel homesick and of little importance.
In New York, they spent the night in a hotel, and the next day they
took a di-lusso train, only for signori who were going to Atlantic
City with a special chair for each passenger and a waiter to bring
things to eat and drink. She hung behind her chair the mink stole
that Joe had given her for a present, and everyone saw it and
admired it and judged her to be a rich signora. Joe called the waiter
over and told him to bring some whiskey and seltz, but the waiter
pretended not to understand what Joe was saying and to be so busy
waiting on other people that they would have to be the last, and she
felt again that shame and anger at discovering that because they
could not speak elegantly the language of this new country they
would be treated with great discourtesy, as if they were pigs. And
that is the way they were treated on the passage, for the waiter did
not come near them again, as if their money was not as good as the
money of the others. They went first through a great, dark galleria
and then out into a country that was ugly and potent with fire
exploding from many chimneys, and there were trees and rivers
and places for boating. She looked out of the window at the country
that streamed by as swiftly and gently as water, to see if it was as
fair as Italy, but what she saw was that it was not her country, her
earth. Near the cities they passed those places where the poor lived
and where washing was hung on lines, and she thought that this
was the same — that washing on lines must be the same all over
the world. And the houses of the poor were the same, too, the way
they leaned against one another and had gardens that were not
commodious but that were cultivated, you could see, with
gentleness and love. It was in the middle of the day or later when
they left, and, as they sped through the country and the afternoon,
she saw that the schools were closing and that on the streets there
were many children carrying books and riding bicycles and playing
games, and many of them waved to the train as it rolled along and
she waved back to them. She waved to some children who were
walking through the high grass in a field, and she waved to two
boys on a bridge, and she waved to an old man, and they all waved
back to her, and she waved to three girls, and she waved to a lady
who was pushing a baby carriage, and she waved to a little boy
who was wearing a yellow coat and carrying a valise, and he waved
back. They all waved back. Then she could see that they were
coming close to the ocean, for there was a bareness in the air and
not so many trees and many pictures of hotels painted on wood
saying how many hundreds of rooms they had and how many
different kinds of places for drinking cocktails, and she was happy
to see the name of their hotel on one of these signs and to be sure
that it was di-lusso. Then the train stopped and it was the end of the
passage and she felt shy and timid, but Joe said andiamo, and the
waiter who had been so discourteous to them took their bags away
and reached for her mink stole, but she said, "No, thank you," and
got it away from him, the pig. And then there was the largest black
car she had ever seen in the life, with a sign on it saying the name
of their hotel, and they got into this with some other people, but
they did not speak to one another on the passage, because she did
not want the others to know that she could not speak the language
of
this
country.
The hotel was very di-lusso, and they ascended in an elevator, and
walked down a hall that was covered with thick carpet, into a fine
room, also with thick carpet everywhere, and a toilet — only with
no bidet — and when the waiter had gone Joe got a bottle of
whiskey out of his valise and had a drink and asked her to come
and sit in his lap, and she said a little later, later, for it was unlucky
in the daylight, and it would be better to wait for the moon to rise,
and she would like to go down and see the dining rooms and
lounges. She wondered if the salt air would be bad for the mink,
and Joe had another drink, and out of the window she could see the
ocean and the lines of white waves coming in, and because the
windows were closed and she could hear the sound the waves made
when they broke it seemed like something she was dreaming. They
went down again, not speaking, because she had distinctly come to
feel that it was better not to speak the bella lingua in such a
luxurious place, and they looked in the bars and dining rooms,
which were grand, and then went out onto a broad walk beside the
sea and there was salt in the air, like Venice, and it smelled like
Venice, and there was also a smell of frying food in the air, which
reminded her of the feast of San Giuseppe in Rome. On one side of
them was the green, cold sea, which she had crossed to come to this
new world, and on the other side of them there were many
diverting things. They walked along until they came to the gypsies,
where there was in the window a drawing of the human hand and
where one's fortune could be told, and when she asked if they could
speak Italian they said, "Si, si, si non c'e dubbio!" and Joe gave her
a dollar, and she went behind a curtain with the gypsy, who looked
at her hand and began to tell her fortune, but it was not Italian she
was speaking, it was a bastard language of a little Spanish and a
little something that Clementina had never heard before, and she
could only understand a word here and there, like "the sea" and
"the voyage," but she could not tell if this was a voyage she would
make or a voyage she had made, and she became impatient with the
gypsy, who had made a lie in saying that she spoke in Italian, and
she asked for her money back, but the gypsy said that if the money
was given back there would be a curse on it. And, knowing what
strong curses the gypsies make, she did not create a further
disturbance, and went out where Joe was waiting for her on the
wooden walk, and walked along again between the green sea and
the diversions of frying food, where people called to them to come
in and spend their money, smiling and beckoning wickedly like the
angels of Hell. And then there was the tramonto, and the lights
went on gloriously like pearls, and, looking back, she could see the
pink windows of the hotel where they were known, where they had
a room of their own they could return to when they pleased, and the
noise of the sea sounded like distant blasting in the mountains.
She was a good wife to him, and in the morning he was so greatful
that he bought her a silver dish for the butter and a cover for the
ironing board and a pair of red pants, laced with gold. The mother
would give her the tail of the Devil, she knew, for wearing pants,
and in Rome she herself would spit in the eye of a woman who was
so badly educated as to wear pants, but this was a new world and it
was no sin, and in the afternoon she wore the mink stole and the
red pants and went with Joe up and down the wooden walk above
the sea. On Saturday they went home, and on Monday they bought
the furniture, and on Tuesday it was delivered, and on Friday she
put on the red pants and went to the supermarket with Maria
Pelluchi, who explained the labels on the boxes to her, and she
looked so much like an American that people were surprised when
she
could
not
speak
the
language.
But if she could not speak the language she could do everything
else, and she even learned to drink whiskey without coughing and
spitting. In the morning, she would turn on all the machines and
watch the TV, learning the words of the songs, and in the
afternoons Maria Pelluchi came to her house and they watched the
TV together, and in the evening she watched it with Joe. She tried
to write the mother about the things she had bought — much finer
things than the Pope possessed — but she realized that the letter
would only bewilder the mother, and in the end she sent her
nothing but postcards. No one could describe how diverting and
commodious her life had become. In the summer, in the evenings,
Joe took her to the races in Baltimore, and she had never seen
anything so carina — the little horses and the lights and the flowers
and the red coat of the marshal with his bugle. That summer, they
went to the races every Friday and sometimes oftener, and it was
one night there, when she was wearing her red pants and drinking
whiskey, that she saw her signore for the first time since they had
quarreled.
She asked him how he was, and how was his family, and he said,
"We are not together. We are divorced." Looking into his face then,
she saw not the end of his marriage but the end of his happiness.
The advantage was hers, because hadn't she explained to him that
he was like a boy with stars in his eyes, but some part of his loss
seemed to be hers as well. Then he went away, and, although the
race was beginning, she saw instead the white snow and the wolves
of Nascosta, the pack coming up the Via Cavour and crossing
thepiazza as if they were bent on some errand of that darkness that
she knew to lie at the heart of life, and, remembering the cold on
her skin and the whiteness of the snow and the stealth of the
wolves, she wondered why the good God had opened up so many
choices and made life so strange and diverse.
The Angel of the Bridge
You may have seen my mother waltzing on ice skates in
Rockefeller Center. She's seventy-eight years old now but very
wiry, and she wears a red velvet costume with a short skirt. Her
tights are flesh-colored, and she wears spectacles and a red ribbon
in her white hair, and she waltzes with one of the rink attendants. I
don't know why I should find the fact that she waltzes on ice skates
so disconcerting, but I do. I avoid that neighborhood whenever I
can during the winter months, and I never lunch in the restaurants
on the rink. Once when I was passing that way, a total stranger took
me by the arm and, pointing to Mother, said, "Look at that crazy
old dame." I was very embarrassed. I suppose I should be grateful
for the fact that she amuses herself and is not a burden to me, but I
sincerely wish she had hit on some less conspicuous recreation.
Whenever I see gracious old ladies arranging chrysanthemums and
pouring tea, I think of my own mother, dressed like a hat-check
girl, pushing some paid rink attendant around the ice, in the middle
of
the
third-biggest
city
of
the
world.
My mother learned to figure-skate in the little New England village
of St. Botolphs, where we come from, and her waltzing is an
expression of her attachment to the past. The older she grows, the
more she longs for the vanishing and provincial world of her youth.
She is a hardy woman, as you can imagine, but she does not relish
change. I arranged one summer for her to fly to Toledo and visit
friends. I drove her to the Newark airport. She seemed troubled by
the airport waiting room, with its illuminated advertisements,
vaulted ceiling, and touching and painful scenes of separation
played out to an uproar of continuous tango music. She did not
seem to find it in any way interesting or beautiful, and compared to
the railroad station in St. Botolphs it was indeed a strange
background against which to take one's departure. The flight was
delayed for an hour, and we sat in the waiting room. Mother looked
tired and old. When we had been waiting half an hour, she began to
have some noticeable difficulty in breathing. She spread a hand
over the front of her dress and began to gasp deeply, as if she was
in pain. Her face got mottled and red. I pretended not to notice this.
When the plane was announced, she got to her feet and exclaimed,
"I want to go home! If I have to die suddenly, I don't want to die in
a flying machine." I cashed in her ticket and drove her back to her
apartment, and I have never mentioned this seizure to her or to
anyone, but her capricious, or perhaps neurotic, fear of dying in a
plane crash was the first insight I had into how, as she grew older,
her way was strewn with invisible rocks and lions and how
eccentric were the paths she took, as the world seemed to change
its boundaries and become less and less comprehensible. At the
time of which I'm writing, I flew a great deal myself. My business
was in Rome, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and I
sometimes traveled as often as once a month between these cities. I
liked the flying. I liked the incandescence of the sky at high
altitudes. I liked all eastward flights where you can see from the
ports the edge of night move over the continent and where, when it
is four o'clock by your California watch, the housewives of Garden
City are washing up the supper dishes and the stewardess in the
plane is passing a second round of drinks. Toward the end of the
flight, the air is stale. You are tired. The gold thread in the
upholstery scratches your cheek, and there is a momentary feeling
of forlornness, a sulky and childish sense of estrangement. You
find good companions, of course, and bores, but most of the
errands we run at such high altitudes are humble and terrestrial.
That old lady, flying over the North Pole, is taking ajar of calf sfoot jelly to her sister in Paris, and the man beside her sells
imitation-leather inner soles. Flying westward one dark night — we
had crossed the Continental Divide, but we were still an hour out of
Los Angeles and had not begun our descent, and were at such an
altitude that the sense of houses, cities, and people below us was
lost — I saw a formation, a trace of light, like the lights that burn
along a shore. There was no shore in that part of the world, and I
knew I would never know if the edge of the desert or some bluff or
mountain accounted for this hoop of light, but it seemed, in its
obscurity — and at that velocity and height — like the emergence
of a new world, a gentle hint at my own obsolescence, the lateness
of my time of life, and my inability to understand the things I often
see. It was a pleasant feeling, completely free of regret, of being
caught in some observable mid-passage, the farther reaches of
which
might
be
understood
by
my
sons.
I liked to fly, as I say, and had none of my mother's anxieties. It
was my older brother — her darling — who was to inherit her
resoluteness, her stubbornness, her table silver, and some of her
eccentricities. One evening, my brother — I had not seen him for a
year or so — called and asked if he could come for dinner. I was
happy to invite him. We live on the eleventh floor of an appartment
house, and at seven-thirty he telephoned from the lobby and asked
me to come down. I thought he must have something to tell me
privately, but when we met in the lobby he got into the automatic
elevator with me and we started up. As soon as the doors closed, he
showed the same symptoms of fear I had seen in my mother. Sweat
stood out on his forehead, and he gasped like a runner. "What in the
world is the matter?" I asked. "I'm afraid of elevators," he said
miserably. "But what are you afraid of?" "I'm afraid the building
will fall down." I laughed — cruelly, I guess. For it all seemed
terribly funny, his vision of the buildings of New York banging
against one another like ninepins as they fell to the earth. There has
always been a strain of jealousy in our feelings about one another,
and I am aware, at some obscure level, that he makes more money
and has more of everything than I, and to see him humiliated —
crushed -saddened me but at the same time and in spite of myself
made me feel that I had taken a stunning lead in the race for
honours that is at the bottom of our relationship. He is the oldest,
he is the favorite, but watching his misery in the elevator I felt that
he was merely my poor old brother, overtaken by his worries. He
stopped in the hallway to recover his composure, and explained
that he had been suffering from this phobia for over a year.
He was going to a psychiatrist, he said. I couldn't see that it had
done him any good. He was all right once lie got out of the
elevator, but I noticed that he stayed away from the windows.
When it was time to go, I walked him out to the corridor. I was
curious. When the elevator reached our floor, he turn to me and
said, "I'm afraid I'll have to take the stairs." I led him to the
stairway, and we climbed slowly down the eleven flights. He clung
to the railing. We said goodbye in the lobby, and I went up in the
elevator, and told my wife about his fear that the building might
fall down. It seemed strange and sad to her, and it did to me, too,
but
it
also
seemed
terribly
funny.
It wasn't terribly funny when, a month later, the firm he worked for
moved to the fifty-second floor of a new office building and he had
to resign. I don't know what reasons he gave. It was another six
months before he could find a job in a third-floor office. I once saw
him on a winter dusk at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fiftyninth Street, waiting for the light to change. He appeared to be an
intelligent, civilized, and well-dressed man, and I wondered how
many of the men waiting with him to cross the street made their
way as he did through a ruin of absurd delusions, in which the
street might appear to be a torrent and the approaching cab driven
by
the
angel
of
death.
He was quite all right on the ground. My wife and I went to his
house in New Jersey, with the children, for a weekend, and he
looked healthy and well. I didn't ask about his phobia. We drove
back to New York on Sunday afternoon. As we approached the
George Washington Bridge, I saw a thunderstorm over the city. A
strong wind struck the car the moment we were on the bridge, and
nearly took the wheel out of my hand. It seemed to me that I could
feel the huge structure swing. Halfway across the bridge, I thought
I felt the roadway begin to give. I could see no signs of a collapse,
and yet I was convinced that in another minute the bridge would
split in two and hurl the long lines of Sunday traffic into the dark
water below us. This imagined disaster was terrifying. My legs got
so weak that I was not sure I could brake the car if I needed to.
Then it became difficult for me to breathe. Only by opening my
mouth and gasping did I seem able to take in any air. My blood
pressure was affected and I began to feel a darkening of my vision.
Fear has always seemed to me to run a course, and at its climax the
body and perhaps the spirit defend themselves by drawing on some
new and fresh source of strength. Once over the center of the
bridge, my pain and terror began to diminish. My wife and the
children were admiring the storm, and they did not seem to have
noticed my spasm. I was afraid both that the bridge would fall
down
and
that
they
might
observe
my
panic.
I thought back over the weekend for some incident that might
account for my preposterous fear that the George Washington
Bridge would blow away in a thunderstorm, but it had been a
pleasant weekend, and even under the most exaggerated scrutiny I
couldn't uncover any source of morbid nervousness or anxiety.
Later in the week, I had to drive to Albany, and, although the day
was clear and windless, the memory of my first attack was too
keen; I hugged the cast bank of the river as far north as Troy where
I found a small, old-fashioned bridge that I could cross
comfortably. This meant going fifteen or twenty miles out of my
way, and it is humiliating to have your travels obstructed by
barriers that are senseless and invisible. I drove back from Albany
by the same route, and next morning I went to the family doctor
and
told
him
I
was
afraid
of
bridges.
He laughed. "You, of all people," he said scornfully. "You'd better
take
hold
of
yourself."
"But Mother is afraid of airplanes," I said. "And Brother hates
elevators."
"Your mother is past seventy," he said, "and one of the most
remarkable women I've ever known. I wouldn't bring her into this.
What
you
need
is
a
little
more
backbone."
This was all he had to say, and I asked him to recommend an
analyst. He does not include psychoanalysis in medical science,
and told me I would be wasting my time and money, but, yielding
to his obligation to be helpful, he gave me the name and address of
a psychiatrist, who told me that my fear of bridges was the surface
manifestation of a deep-seated anxiety and that I would have to
have a full analysis. I didn't have the time, or the money, or, above
all, the confidence in the doctor's methods to put myself in his
hands, and I said I would try and muddle through.
There are obviously areas of true and false pain, and my pain was
meretricious, but how could I convince my lights and vitals of this?
My youth and childhood had their deeply troubled and their
jubilant years, and could some repercussions from this past account
for my fear of heights? The thought of a life determined by hidden
obstacles was unacceptable, and I decided to take the advice of the
family doctor and ask more of myself. I had to go to Idlewild later
in the week, and, rather than take a bus or a taxi, I drove the car
myself. I nearly lost consciousness on the Triborough Bridge.
When I got to the airport I ordered a cup of coffee, but my hand
was shaking so I spilled the coffee on the counter. The man beside
me was amused and said that I must have put in quite a night. How
could I tell him that I had gone to be early and sober but that I was
afraid
of
bridges?
I flew to Los Angeles late that afternoon. It was one o'clock by my
watch when we landed. It was only ten o'clock in California. I was
tired and took a taxi to the hotel where I always stay, but I couldn't
sleep. Outside my hotel window was a monumental statue of a
young woman advertising a Las Vegas night club. She revolves
slowly in a beam of light. At 2 A.M. the light is extinguished, but
she goes on restlessly turning all through the night. I have never
seen her cease her turning, and I wondered, that night, when they
greased her axle and washed her shoulders. I felt some affection for
her, since neither of us could rest, and I wondered if she had a
family — a stage mother, perhaps, and a compromised and brokenspirited father who drove a municipal bus on the West Pico line?
There was a restaurant across the street, and I watched a drunken
woman in a sable cape being led out to a car. She twice nearly fell.
The crosslights from the open door, the lateness, her drunkenness,
and the solicitude of the man with her made the scene, I thought,
worried and lonely. Then two cars that seemed to be racing down
Sunset Boulevard pulled up at a traffic light under my window.
Three men piled out of each car and began to slug one another. You
could hear the blows land on bone and cartilage. When the light
changed, they got back into their cars and raced off. The fight, like
the hoop of light I had seen from the plane, seemed like the signs of
a new world, but in this case an emergence of brutality and chaos.
Then I remembered that I was to go to San Francisco on Thursday,
and was expected in Berkeley for lunch. This meant crossing the
San Francisco — Oakland Bay Bridge, and I reminded myself to
take a cab both ways and leave the car I rented in San Francisco in
the hotel garage. I tried again to reason out my fear that the bridge
would fall. Was I the victim of some sexual dislocation? My life
has been promiscuous, carefree, and a source of immense pleasure,
but was there some secret here that would leave to be mined by a
professional? Were all my pleasures impostures and evasions, and
was I really in love with my old mother in her skating costume?
Looking at Sunset Boulevard at three in the morning, I felt that my
terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed
horror of what is becoming of the world. I can drive with
composure through the outskirts of Cleveland and Toledo — past
the birthplace of the Polish Hot Dog, the Buffalo Burger stands, the
used-car lots, and the architectural monotony. I claim to enjoy
walking down Hollywood Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon. I have
cheerfully praised the evening sky hanging beyond the disheveled
and expatriated palm trees on Doheny Boulevard, stuck up against
the incandescence, like rank upon rank of wet mops. Duluth and
East Seneca are charming, and if they aren't, just look away. The
hideousness of the road between San Francisco and Palo Alto is
nothing more than the search of honest men and women for a
decent place to live. The same thing goes for San Pedro and all that
coast. But the height of bridges seemed to be one link I could not
forget or fasten in this hypocritical chain of acceptances. The truth
is, I hate freeways and Buffalos Burgers. Expatriated palm trees
and monotonous housing developments depress me. The
continuous music on special-fare trains exacerbates my feelings. I
detest the destruction of familiar landmarks, I am deeply troubled
by the misery and drunkenness I find among my friends, I abhor
the dishonest practices I see. And it was at the highest point in the
are of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and
bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the
profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and
peaceable
world.
But I couldn't reform Sunset Boulevard, and until I could, I couldn't
drive across the San Francisco — Oakland Bay Bridge. What could
I do? Go back to St. Botolphs, wear a Norfolk jacket, and play
cribbage in the firehouse? There was only one bridge in the village,
and you could throw a stone across the river there.
I got home from San Francisco on Saturday, and found my
daughter back from school for the weekend. On Sunday morning,
she asked me to drive her to the convent school in Jersey where she
is a student. She had to be back in time for nine-o'clock Mass, and
we left our apartment in the city a little after seven. We were
talking and laughing, and I had approached and was in fact on the
George Washington Bridge without having remembered my
weakness. There were no preliminaries this time. The seizure came
with a rush. The strength went out of my legs, I gasped for breath,
and felt the terrifying loss of sight. I was, at the same time,
determined to conceal these symptoms from my daughter. I made
the other side of the bridge, but I was violently shaken. My
daughter didn't seem to have noticed. I got her to school in time,
kissed her goodbye, and started home. There was no question of
any crossing the George Washington Bridge again, and I decided to
drive north to Nyack and cross on the Tappan Zee Bridge. It
seemed, in my memory, more gradual and more securely anchored
to its shores. Driving up the parkway on the west shore, I decided
that oxygen was what I needed, and I opened all the windows of the
car. The fresh air seemed to help, but only momentarily. I could
feel my sense of reality ebbing. The roadside and the car itself
seemed to have less substance than a dream. I had some friends in
the neighborhood, and I thought of stopping and asking them for a
drink, but it was only a little after nine in the morning and I could
not face the embarrassment of asking for a drink so early in the
day, and of explaining that I was afraid of bridges. I thought I
might feel better if I talked to someone and I stopped at a gas
station and bought some gas, but the attendant was laconic and
sleepy, and I couldn't explain to him that his conversation might
make the difference between life and death. I had got onto the
Thruway by then, and I wondered what alternatives I had if I
couldn't cross the bridge. I could call my wife and ask her to make
some arrangements for removing me, but our relationship involves
so much self-esteem and face that to admit openly to this
foolishness might damage our married happiness. I could call the
garage we use and ask them to send up a man to chauffeur me
home. I could park the car and wait until one o'clock, when the bars
opened, and fill up on whiskey, but I had spent the last of my
money for gasoline. I decided to take a chance, and turned onto the
approach
to
the
bridge.
All the symptoms returned, and this time they were much worse
than ever. The wind was knocked out of my lungs as by a blow. My
equilibrium was so shaken that the car swerved from one lane into
another. I drove to the side and pulled on the hand brake. The
loneliness of my predicament was harrowing. If I had been
miserable with romantic love, racked with sickness, or beastly
drunk, it would have seemed more dignified. I remembered my
brother's face, sallow and greasy with sweat in the elevator, and my
mother in her red skirt, one leg held gracefully aloft as she coasted
backward in the arms of a rink attendant, and it seemed to me that
we were all three characters in some bitter and sordid tragedy,
carrying impossible burdens and separated from the rest of
mankind by our misfortunes. My life was over, and it would never
come back, everything that I loved — blue-sky courage, lustiness,
the natural grasp of things. It would never come back. I would end
up in the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, screaming that the
bridges, all the bridges in the world, were falling down.
Then a young girl opened the door of the car and got in. "I didn't
think anyone would pick me up on the bridge," she said. She
carried a cardboard suitcase and — believe me — a small harp in a
cracked waterproof. Her straight light-brown hair was brushed and
brushed and grained with blondness and spread in a kind of cape
over her shoulders. Her face seemed full and merry.
"Are
you
hitchhiking?"
I
asked.
"Yes."
"But
isn't
it
dangerous
"Not
"Do
for
a
at
you
girl
your
age?"
all."
travel
much?"
"All the time. I sing a little. I play the coffee-houses."
"What
do
you
sing?"
"Oh, folk music, mostly. And some old things — Purcell and
Dowland. But mostly folk music... 'I gave my love a cherry that
had no stone,'" she sang in a true and pretty voice. '"I gave my love
a chicken that had no bone/I told my love a story that had no end/I
gave
my
love
a
baby
with
no
cryin'.'"
She sang me across a bridge that seemed to be an astonishingly
sensible, durable, and even beautiful construction designed by
intelligent men to simplify my travels, and the water of the Hudson
below us was charming and tranquil. It all came back — blue-sky
courage, the high spirits of lustiness, and ecstatic sereneness. Her
song ended as we got to the toll station on the east bank, and she
thanked me, said goodbye, and got out of the car. I offered to take
her wherever she wanted to go, but she shook her head and walked
away, and I drove on toward the city through a world that, having
been restored to me, seemed marvelous and fair. When I got home,
I thought of calling my brother and telling him what had happened,
on the chance that there was also an angel of the elevator banks, but
the harp — that single detail — threatened to make me seem
ridiculous
or
mad,
and
I
didn't
call.
I wish I could say that I am convinced that there will always be
some merciful intercession to help me with my worries, but I don't
believe in rushing my luck, so I will stay off the George
Washington Bridge, although I can cross the Triborough and the
Tappan Zee with ease. My brother is still afraid of elevators, and
my mother, although she's grown quite stiff, still goes around and
around and around on the ice.
The Swimmer
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone
sits around saying, "I drank too much last night." You might
have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church,
heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his
cassock in thevestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the
tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader
of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover.
"I drank too much," said Donald Westerhazy. "We all drank too
much," said Lucinda Merrill. "It must have been the wine," said
Helen Westerhazy. "I drank too much of that claret."
This was at the edge of the Westerhazys' pool. The pool, fed by
an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of
green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of
cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance—from the bow
of an approaching ship—that it might have had a name. Lisbon.
Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy Merrill sat by the green
water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was a slender
man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and
while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that
morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall
table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his
dining room. He might have been compared to a summer's day,
particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis
racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth,
sport, and clement weather. He had been swimming and now he
was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his
lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the
intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into his chest.
His own house stood in Bullet Park, eight miles to the south,
where his four beautiful daughters would have had their lunch
and might be playing tennis. Then it occurred to him that by
taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by
water.
His life was not confining and the delight he took in this
observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of
swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved
across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to
modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his
wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was
determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of
himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it
seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its
beauty.
He took off a sweater that was hung over his shoulders and dove
in. He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl
themselves into pools. He swam a choppy crawl, breathing either
with every stroke or every fourth stroke and counting somewhere
well in the back of his mind the one-two one-two of a flutter
kick. It was not a serviceable stroke for long distances but the
domestication of swimming had saddled the sport with some
customs and in his part of the world a crawl was customary. To
be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a
pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition,
and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not
possible, considering his project. He hoisted himself up on the
far curb—he never used the ladder—and started across the lawn.
When Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going
to swim home.
The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or
imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the
Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the
Crosscups. He would cross Ditmar Street to the Bunkers and
come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and the
public pool in Lancaster. Then there were the Hallorans, the
Sachses, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the
Clydes. The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so
generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a
beneficence. His heart was high and he ran across the grass.
Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the
feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny,
and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends
would line the banks of the Lucinda River.
He went through a hedge that separated the Westerhazys' land
from the Grahams', walked under some flowering apple trees,
passed the shed that housed their pump and filter, and came out
at the Grahams' pool. "Why, Neddy," Mrs. Graham said, "what a
marvelous surprise. I've been trying to get you on the phone all
morning. Here, let me get you a drink." He saw then, like any
explorer, that the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives
would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to
reach his destination. He did not want to mystify or seem rude to
the Grahams nor did he have the time to linger there. He swam
the length of their pool and joined them in the sun and was
rescued, a few minutes later, by the arrival of two carloads of
friends from Connecticut. During the uproarious reunions he was
able to slip away. He went down by the front of the Grahams'
house, stepped over a thorny hedge, and crossed a vacant lot to
the Hammers'. Mrs. Hammer, looking up from her roses, saw
him swim by although she wasn't quite sure who it was. The
Lears heard him splashing past the open windows of their living
room. The Howlands and the Crosscups were away. After
leaving the Howlands' he crossed Ditmar Street and started for
the Bunkers', where he could hear, even at that distance, the
noise of a party.
The water refracted the sound of voices and laughter and seemed
to suspend it in midair. The Bunkers' pool was on a rise and he
climbed some stairs to a terrace where twenty-five or thirty men
and women were drinking. The only person in the water was
Rusty Towers, who floated there on a rubber raft. Oh, how
bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda River! Prosperous
men and women gathered by the sapphire-colored waters while
caterer's men in white coats passed them cold gin. Overhead a
red de Haviland trainer was circling around and around and
around in the sky with something like the glee of a child in a
swing. Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a tenderness for
the gathering, as if it was something he might touch. In the
distance he heard thunder. As soon as Enid Bunker saw him she
began to scream: "Oh, look who's here! What a marvelous
surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn't come I thought
I'd die." She made her way to him through the crowd, and when
they had finished kissing she led him to the bar, a progress that
was slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other
women and shake the hands of as many men. A smiling
bartender he had seen at a hundred parties gave him a gin and
tonic and he stood by the bar for a moment, anxious not to get
stuck in any conversation that would delay his voyage. When he
seemed about to be surrounded he dove in and swam close to the
side to avoid colliding with Rusty's raft. At the far end of the
pool he bypassed the Tomlinsons with a broad smile and jogged
up the garden path. The gravel cut his feet but this was the only
unpleasantness. The party was confined to the pool, and as he
went toward the house he heard the brilliant, watery sound of
voices fade, heard the noise of a radio from the Bunkers' kitchen,
where someone was listening to a ball game. Sunday afternoon.
He made his way through the parked cars and down the grassy
border of their driveway to Alewives Lane. He did not want to
be seen on the road in his bathing trunks but there was no traffic
and he made the short distance to the Levys' driveway, marked
with a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign and a green tube for The
New York Times. All the doors and windows of the big house
were open but there were no signs of life; not even a dog barked.
He went around the side of the house to the pool and saw that the
Levys had only recently left. Glasses and bottles and dishes of
nuts were on a table at the deep end, where there was a
bathhouse or gazebo, hung with Japanese lanterns. After
swimming the pool he got himself a glass and poured a drink. It
was his fourth or fifth drink and he had swum nearly half the
length of the Lucinda River. He felt tired, clean, and pleased at
that moment to be alone; pleased with everything.
It would storm. The stand of cumulus cloud—that city—had
risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard the
percussiveness of thunder again. The de Haviland trainer was
still circling overhead and it seemed to Ned that he could almost
hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon; but when
there was another peal of thunder he took off for home. A train
whistle blew and he wondered what time it had gotten to be.
Four? Five? He thought of the provincial station at that hour,
where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, a dwarf with
some flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman who had
been crying would be waiting for the local. It was suddenly
growing dark; it was that moment when the pin-headed birds
seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable
recognition of the storm's approach. Then there was a fine noise
of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a
spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came
from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms,
what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang
open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stairs, why had the
simple task, of shutting the windows of an old house seemed
fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind
have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad
tidings? Then there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain
lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto
the year before last, or was it the year before that?
He stayed in the Levys' gazebo until the storm had passed. The
rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of the wind
had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered
them over the grass and the water. Since it was midsummer the
tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this
sign of autumn. He braced his shoulders, emptied his glass, and
started for the Welchers' pool. This meant crossing the Lindleys'
riding ring and he was surprised to find it overgrown with grass
and all the jumps dismantled. He wondered if the Lindleys had
sold their horses or gone away for the summer and put them out
to board. He seemed to remember having heard something about
the Lindleys and their horses but the memory was unclear. On he
went, barefoot through the wet grass, to the Welchers', where he
found their pool was dry.
This breach in his chain of water disappointed him absurdly, and
he felt like some explorer who seeks a torrential headwater and
finds a dead stream. He was disappointed and mystified. It was
common enough to go away for the summer but no one ever
drained his pool. The Welchers had definitely gone away. The
pool furniture was folded, stacked, and covered with a tarpaulin.
The bathhouse was locked. All the windows of the house were
shut, and when he went around to the driveway in front he saw a
FOR SALE sign nailed to a tree. When had he last heard from
the Welchers—when, that is, had he and Lucinda last regretted
an invitation to dine with them? It seemed only a week or so ago.
Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the
repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of
the truth? Then in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis
game. This cheered him, cleared away all his apprehensions and
let him regard the overcast sky and the cold air with indifference.
This was the day that Neddy Merrill swam across the county.
That was the day! He started off then for his most difficult
portage.
Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might
have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of
Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have
wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken
down, or was he merely a fool. Standing barefoot in the deposits
of the highway—beer cans, rags, and blowout patches—exposed
to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful. He had known when he
started that this was a part of his journey—it had been on his
maps—but confronted with the lines of traffic, worming through
the summery light, he found himself unprepared. He was
laughed at, jeered at, a beer can was thrown at him, and he had
no dignity or humor to bring to the situation. He could have gone
back, back to the Westerhazys', where Lucinda would still be
sitting in the sun. He had signed nothing, vowed nothing,
pledged nothing, not even to himself. Why, believing as he did,
that all human obduracy was susceptible to common sense, was
he unable to turn back? Why was he determined to complete his
journey even if it meant putting his life in danger? At what point
had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?
He could not go back, he could not even recall with any
clearness the green water at the Westerhazys', the sense of
inhaling the day's components, the friendly and relaxed voices
saying that they had drunktoo much. In the space of an hour,
more or less, be had covered a distance that made his return
impossible.
An old man, tooling down the highway at fifteen miles an hour,
let him get to the middle of the road, where there was a grass
divider. Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound
traffic, but after ten or fifteen minutes he was able to cross. From
here he had only a short walk to the Recreation Center at the
edge of the village of Lancaster, where there were some handball
courts and a public pool.
The effect of the water on voices, the illusion of brilliance and
suspense, was the same here as it had been at the Bunkers' but
the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill, and as
soon as he entered the crowded enclosure he was confronted
with regimentation. "ALL SWIMMERS MUST TAKE A
SHOWER BEFORE USING THE POOL. ALL SWIMMERS
MUST USE THE FOOTBATH, ALL SWIMMERS MUST
WEAR THEIR IDENTIFICATION DISKS." He took a shower,
washed his feet in a cloudy and bitter solution, and made his way
to the edge of the water. It stank of chlorine and looked to him
like a sink. A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police
whistles at what seemed to be regular intervals and abused the
swimmers through a public address system. Neddy remembered
the sapphire water at the Bunkers' with longing and thought that
he might contaminate himself—damage his own prosperousness
and charm—by swimming in this murk, but he reminded himself
that be was an explorer, a pilgrim, and that this was merely a
stagnant bend in the Lucinda River. He dove, scowling with
distaste, into the chlorine and had to swim with his head above
water to avoid collisions, but even so he was bumped into,
splashed, and jostled. When he got to the shallow end both
lifeguards were shouting at him: "Hey, you, you without the
identification disk, get outa the water." He did, but they had no
way of pursuing him and he went through the reek of suntan oil,
and chlorine out through the hurricane fence and passed the
handball courts. By crossing the road he entered the wooded part
of the Halloran estate. The woods were not cleared and the
footing was treacherous and difficult until he reached the lawn
and the clipped beech hedge that encircled their pool.
The Hallorans were friends, an elderly couple of enormous
wealth who seemed to bask in the suspicion that they might be
Communists. They were zealous reformers but they were not
Communists, and yet when they were accused, as they
sometimes were, of subversion, it seemed to gratify and excite
them. Their beech hedge was yellow and he guessed this had
been blighted like the Levys' maple. He called hullo, hullo, to
warn the Hallorans of his approach, to palliate his invasion of
their privacy. The Hallorans, for reasons that had never been
explained to him, did not wear bathing suits. No explanations
were in order, really. Their nakedness was a detail in their
uncompromising zeal for reform and he stepped politely out of
his trunks before he went through the opening in the hedge.
Mrs. Halloran, a stout woman with white hair and a serene face,
was reading the Times. Mr. Halloran was taking beech leaves out
of the water with a scoop. They seemed not surprised or
displeased to see him. Their pool was perhaps the oldest in the
country, a fieldstone rectangle, fed by a brook. It had no filter or
pump and its waters were the opaque gold of the stream.
"I'm swimming across the county," Ned said.
"Why, I didn't know one could," exclaimed Mrs. Halloran.
"Well, I've made it from the Westerhazys'," Ned said. "That must
be about four miles."
He left his trunks at the deep end, walked to the shallow end, and
swam this stretch. As he was pulling himself out of the water he
heard Mrs. Halloran say, "We've beenterribly sorry to bear about
all your misfortunes, Neddy."
"My misfortunes?" Ned asked. "I don't know what you mean."
"Why, we heard that you'd sold the house and that your poor
children . . . "
"I don't recall having sold the house," Ned said, "and the girls are
at home."
"Yes," Mrs. Halloran sighed. "Yes . . . " Her voice filled the air
with an unseasonable melancholy and Ned spoke briskly. "Thank
you for the swim."
"Well, have a nice trip," said Mrs. Halloran.
Beyond the hedge he pulled on his trunks and fastened them.
They were loose and he wondered if, during the space of an
afternoon, he could have lost some weight. He was cold and he
was tired and the naked Hallorans and their dark water had
depressed him. The swim was too much for his strength but how
could he have guessed this, sliding down the banister that
morning and sitting in the Westerhazys' sun? His arms were
lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached at the joints. The worst of
it was the cold in his bones and the feeling that he might never
be warm again. Leaves were falling down around him and he
smelled wood smoke on the wind. Who would be burning wood
at this time of year?
He needed a drink. Whiskey would warm him, pick him up,
carry him through the last of his journey, refresh his feeling that
it was original and valorous to swim across the county. Channel
swimmers took brandy. He needed a stimulant. He crossed the
lawn in front of the Hallorans' house and went down a little path
to where they had built a house, for their only daughter, Helen,
and her husband, Eric Sachs. The Sachses' pool was small and he
found Helen and her husband there.
"Oh, Neddy, " Helen said. "Did you lunch at Mother's?"
"Not really, " Ned said. "I didstop to see your parents." This
seemed to be explanation enough. "I'm terribly sorry to break in
on you like this but I've taken a chill and I wonder if you'd give
me a drink."
"Why, I'd love to," Helen said, "but there hasn't been anything in
this house to drink since Eric's operation. That was three years
ago."
Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful
facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children
were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill? His eyes slipped
from Eric's face to his abdomen, where be saw three pale,
sutured scars, two of them at least a foot long. Gone was his
navel, and what, Neddy thought, would the roving hand, bedchecking one's gifts at 3 a.m., make of a belly with no navel, no
link to birth, this breach in the succession?
"I'm sure you can get a drink at the Biswangers'," Helen said.
"They're having an enormous do. You can hear it from here.
Listen!"
She raised her head and from across the road, the lawns, the
gardens, the woods, the fields, he heard again the brilliant noise
of voices over water. "Well, I'll get wet," he said, still feeling
that he had no freedom of choice about his means of travel. He
dove into the Sachses' cold water and, gasping, close to
drowning, made his way from one end of the pool to the other.
"Lucinda and I wantterribly to see you," he said over his
shoulder, his face set toward the Biswangers'. "We're sorry it's
been so long and we'll call you very soon."
He crossed some fields to the Biswangers' and the sounds of
revelry there. They would be honored to give him a drink, they
would be happy to give him a drink. The Biswangers invited him
and Lucinda for dinner four times a year, six weeks in advance.
They were always rebuffed and yet they continued to send out
their invitations, unwilling to comprehend the rigid and
undemocratic realities of their society. They were the sort of
people who discussed the price of things at cocktails, exchanged
market tips during dinner, and after dinner told dirty stories to
mixed company. They did not belong to Neddy's set—they were
not even on Lucinda's Christmas-card list. He went toward their
pool with feelings of indifference, charity, and some unease,
since it seemed to be getting dark and these were the longest
days of the year. The party when he joined it was noisy and
large. Grace Biswanger was the kind of hostess who asked the
optometrist, the veterinarian, the real-estate dealer, and the
dentist. No one was swimming and the twilight, reflected on the
water of the pool, had a wintry gleam. There was a bar and he
started for this. When Grace Biswanger saw him she came
toward him, not affectionately as he had every right to expect,
but bellicosely.
"Why, this party has everything," she said loudly, "including a
gate crasher."
She could not deal him a social blow—there was no question
about this and he did not flinch. "As a gate crasher," he asked
politely, "do I rate a drink?"
"Suit yourself," she said. "You don't seem to pay much attention
to invitations."
She turned her back on him and joined some guests, and he went
to the bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender served him but
be served him rudely. His was a world in which the caterer's men
kept the social score, and to be rebuffed by a part-time barkeep
meant that be had suffered some loss of social esteem. Or
perhaps the man was new and uninformed. Then he heard Grace
at his back say: "They went for broke overnight—nothing but
income—and he showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to
loan him five thousand dollars. . . ." She was always talking
about money. It was worse than eating your peas off a knife. He
dove into the pool, swam its length and went away.
The next pool on his list, the last but two, belonged to his old
mistress, Shirley Adams. If he had suffered any injuries at the
Biswangers' they would be cured here. Love—sexual
roughhouse in fact—was the supreme elixir, the pain killer, the
brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step,
the joy of life in his heart. They had had an affair last week, last
month, last year. He couldn't remember, It was he who had
broken it off, his was the upper hand, and he stepped through the
gate of the wall that surrounded her pool with nothing so
considered as self-confidence. It seemed in a way to be his pool,
as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions
of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony.
She was there, her hair the color of brass, but her figure, at the
edge of the lighted, cerulean water, excited in him no profound
memories. It had been, he thought, a lighthearted affair, although
she had wept when he broke it off. She seemed confused to see
him and he wondered if she was still wounded. Would she, God
forbid, weep again?
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I'm swimming across the county."
"Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?"
"What's the matter?"
"If you've come here for money," she said, "I won't give you
another cent."
"You could give me a drink."
"I could but I won't. I'm not alone."
"Well, I'm on my way."
He dove in and swam the pool, but when be tried to haul himself
up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and
shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed
out. Looking over his shoulder be saw, in the lighted bathhouse,
a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled
chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stub- born autumnal
fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he
saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see
Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the
constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.
It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever
cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so
miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He could not understand
the rudeness of the caterer's barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress
who had come to him on her knees and showered his trousers
with tears. He had swum too long, he had been immersed too
long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water. What
he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean, dry
clothes, and while he could have cut directly across the road to
his home he went on to the Gilmartins' pool. Here, for the first
time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the
icy water and swam a bobbled sidestroke that he might have
learned as a youth. He staggered with fatigue on his way to the
Clydes' and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and
again with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder
and wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done
what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so
stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.
Stooped, holding on to the gateposts for support, he turned up
the driveway of his own house.
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed?
Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys' for supper? Had the girls
joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn't they agreed, as
they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay
at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but
the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his
hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the
thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung
down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be
fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that
the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up
until he remembered that it had been some time since they had
employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door,
tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the
windows, saw that the place was empty.